A  HISTORY  OF 
ENGLISH    LITERATURE 


BY 
WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY 

ASSISTANT   PROFESSOR   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE   IN   THE 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO 

AND 

ROBERT  MORSS  LOVETT 

ASSISTANT  PROFESSOR  OF  ENGLISH  IN  THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CHICAGO 


REVISED    EDITION 


CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS  . 

NEW  YORK        CHICAGO  BOSTON 


COPYRIGHT,  1902,  1918,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 

N 


PREFACE  TO  REVISED  EDITION 

IN  revising  A  History  of  English  Literature  I  have  kept 
constantly  in  mind  the  leading  idea  which  the  authors  had 
before  them  in  the  original  preparation  of  the  book,  and 
which  is  implied  in  the  original  preface.  It  is  that  the 
teaching  of  literature,  whether  by  handbooks  or  lectures, 
must  have  as  its  first  object  to  stimulate  the  pupil  to  come 
into  immediate  contact  with  that  literature  itself.  I  have 
always  felt  that  William  Vaughn  Moody,  as  teacher  and 
critic,  realized  this  aim  with  extraordinary  success.  Ac- 
cordingly I  have  tried  to  preserve  the  spirit  which  he  gave 
the  book  in  this  respect,  and  have  left  unchanged,  so  far 
as  possible,  the  passages  which  he  wrote  with  this  end  in 
view — to  inspire  his  reader,  not  to  accept  any  critical  view, 
orthodox  or  original,  of  an  author,  but  to  taste  and  see  for 
himself.  At  the  same  time  I  have  increased  somewhat 
the  purely  historical  matter  of  the  book,  and  tried  to  sug- ' 
gest  more  definitely  the  interpretation  of  large  periods 
and  movements.  Much  more  might  be  done  in  this  direc- 
tion, particularly  in  treating  foreign  influences.  I  have, 
however,  sought  not  to  exceed  the  possible  limits  of  first- 
hand study  on  the  part  of  the  reader. 

In  this  revision  I  have  drawn,  without  the  slightest  re- 
serve, on  the  learning  of  my  colleagues  of  the  English 
Department  of  the  University  of  Chicago.  To  Professor 
Thomas  A.  Knott  I  am  particularly  indebted  for  a  careful 
reworking  of  the  first  three  chapters,  and  to  Professor 
John  M.  Manly  for  the  same  service  in  the  pages  on  the 
origin  of  the  drama.  Other  portions  of  the  book  were 
read,  with  helpful  criticism,  by  Professor  C.  R.  Baskervill, 
Professor  T.  P.  Cross,  Professor  J.  W.  Linn,  Doctor  G.  W. 

iii 

20G747G 


VI  PREFACE    TO    FIRST    EDITION 

with  the  most  fascinating  of  stories,  the  story  of  the  imagi- 
native career  of  a  gifted  race;  he  is  in  duty  bound  not  to 
cheapen  or  to  dull  his  theme,  but,  so  far  as  in  him  lies,  to 
give  those  whom  he  addresses  a  realizing  sense  of  the  mag- 
nitude of  our  common  heritage  in  letters.  To  do  this,  he 
must  work  in  the  literary  spirit,  and  with  freedom  of  ap- 
peal to  all  the  latent  capabilities  of  his  reader's  mind. 

The  proportions  of  this  book  have  been  carefully  con- 
sidered. A  full  half  of  the  space  has  been  given  to  the 
last  two  centuries,  and  much  more  to  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury than  to  the  eighteenth.  These  and  other  apportion- 
ments of  space  have  been  made,  not  on  absolute  grounds, 
but  with  the  design  of  throwing  into  prominence  what  is 
most  important  for  a  student  to  learn  upon  his  first  ap- 
proach to  the  subject.  The  chief  figures  in  each  era  have 
been  set  in  relief,  and  the  minor  figures  have  been  grouped 
about  them,  in  an  endeavor  thus  to  suggest  their  relative 
significance.  A  full  working  bibliography,  including  texts, 
Biography,  and  criticism,  has  been  added,  in  the  hope  that 
it  may  be  of  assistance  not  only  in  the  current  work  of  the 
classroom,  but  also  as  a  guide  for  later  study. 

The  thanks  of  the  authors  are  due  to  Professor  F.  N. 
Robinson,  of  Harvard  University,  for  his  kindness  in  criti- 
cising the  contents  of  the  early  chapters. 

W.  V.  M. 
R.  M.  L. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     THE  ANGLO-SAXON  PERIOD i 

II.     THE  NORMAN-FRENCH  PERIOD 23 

III.  THE  AGE  OF  CHAUCER 41 

IV.  THE  RENAISSANCE:  NON-DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  TO 

THE  DEATH  OF  SPENSER 70 

V.     THE    RENAISSANCE:    THE   DRAMA  BEFORE    SHAKE- 
SPEARE      103 

VI.    THE  RENAISSANCE:  SHAKESPEARE 124 

VII.    THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY:  SHAKESPEARE'S  CON- 
TEMPORARIES AND  SUCCESSORS  IN  THE  DRAMA  .    .  143 

VIII.     THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY:  NON-DRAMATIC  LIT- 
ERATURE BEFORE  THE   RESTORATION 158 

IX.    THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  RESTORATION   .  198 

X.    THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  REIGN  OF  CLASSI- 
CISM       215 

XI.    THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY:  BEGINNINGS  OF  ROMAN- 
TICISM   237 

XII.    THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  NOVEL      ....  271 

XIII.  THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  TRIUMPH  OF  RO- 

MANTICISM    297 

XIV.  THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  VICTORIAN  ERA  .  341 


Vill  CONTENTS 


PAGE 

XV.    THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  NOVEL     ....     391 
XVI.     CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE      429 


READING  GUIDE 469 

INDEX      501 


A   HISTORY  OF 

ENGLISH   LITERATURE 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD 

I 

ENGLISH  literature  had  its  beginnings  at  a  time  when 
the  ancestors  of  the  English  people  lived  on  the  conti- 
nent of  Europe  and  spoke  a  tongue  which, 
though  the  ancestor  of  modern  English,  is  s«on  Tribes 
unintelligible  to  us  without  special  study. 
Anglo-Saxon,  or  Old  English,  belongs  to  the  low-German 
group  of  languages,  of  which  Dutch  is  the  best  modern 
representative;  and  the  men  who  spoke  it  lived,  when 
history  first  discovers  them,  along  the  shores  of  the 
North  Sea  from  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine  to  the  peninsula 
of  Jutland.  They  were  divided  into  three  principal 
tribes:  the  Saxons,  dwelling  near  the  mouth  of  the  Elbe; 
the  Angles,  inhabiting  the  southwest  part  of  Denmark; 
and  the  Jutes,  extending  north  of  the  Angles  into  modern 
Jutland. 

How  extensive  these  tribes  were  and  how  far  into  the 
interior  their  territories  reached  we  do  not  know.     That 
portion  of    them  which    concerns   us   dwelt 
along   the  sea;    the   earliest  English   poetry     ^rand0™6' 
which  has  been  preserved,  even  though  it  was     seafaring, 
composed   three  centuries  later  in  England, 
gives  glimpses  backward  into  that  almost  unknown  time 
— glimpses  of  wild  moors  and  dense  forests  where  lurked 


2  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

gigantic  monsters  half  seen  amid  mist  and  darkness; 
glimpses  of  the  stormy  northern  ocean  filled  likewise  with 
shapes  of  shadowy  fear.  Whether  from  superstition  or 
from  the  physical  difficulty  of  the  country,  these  shore 
tribes  seem  not  to  have  penetrated  far  inland.  Their 
two  passions,  war  and  wandering,  urged  them  forth  upon 
the  sea.  As  soon  as  spring  had  unlocked  the  harbors 
their  boats  sailed  out  in  search  of  booty  and  adventure; 
sometimes  to  ravage  or  to  wreak  blood-feud  on  a  neighbor- 
ing tribe,  sometimes  to  harry  a  monastery  on  the  coasts  of 
Roman  Gaul  or  to  plunder  along  the  white  cliffs  of  Eng- 
land, their  future  home.  This  seafaring  life,  full  of 
danger  and  adventure,  was  a  frequent  inspiration  of  the 
poet.  The  sea,  in  the  rich  vocabulary  of  poetry,  is  the 
"seal-bath,"  the  " swan-road,"  the  "whale-path."  The 
ship  is  the  "swimming- wood,"  the  "sea-steed,"  the 
"wave-house  of  warriors";  its  curved  prow  is  "wreathed 
with  foam  like  the  neck  of  a  swan."  The  darker  aspects 
of  the  ocean  are  also  sung  with  fervor.  'The  fatalistic 
Anglo-Saxon  was  fearless  before  the  terror  and  gloom  of 
the  element  which  he  most  loved  to  inhabit. 

No  actual  poetry  has   come  down   to  us  from   that 
earliest  period,  but  the  poetry  of  a  subsequent  age  is 

filled  with  phrases  and  reminiscences  of  an- 
Reiigion  cient  pagan  voyages  and  battles.  This  later 

poetry  is  nearly  all  Christian  in  tone  or  in 
substance.  But  from  other  sources  we  know  what  were 
the  primitive  gods  of  the  race:  Tiu,  a  mysterious  and 
dreadful  deity  of  war;  Woden,  father  of  the  later  dynasty 
of  gods  and  the  patron  of  seers  and  travellers;  Thor,  the 
god  of  thunder;  Frea,  mother  of  the  gods  and  giver  of 
fruitfulness.  These  are  commemorated  in  our  names  of 
the  days  of  the  week — Tuesday,  Wednesday,  Thursday, 
and  Friday.  The  rites  of  Eostre,  a  mysterious  goddess 
of  the  dawn,  survive,  though  strangely  altered,  in  the 
Christian  festival  of  Easter.  In  studying  the  earlier 


THE  ANGLO- SAXOX   PERIOD  3 

poetry,  Christian  though  it  is  superficially,  we  must  put 
out  o'f  our  minds  as  far  as  we  can  all  those  ideals  of  life 
and  conduct  which  come  from  Christianity  and  remem- 
ber that  we  have  to  do  with  men  whose  recently  discarded 
gods  were  only  magnified  images  of  their  own  wild  na- 
tures; men  who  delighted  in  bloodshed,  in  revenge,  and* 
in  plunder,  and  were  much  given  to  deep  drinking  in  the 
mead-hall,  but  who  nevertheless  were  sensitive  to  blame 
and  praise,  were  reared  in  an  elaborate  code  of  manners 
and  endowed  with  chivalry  and  dignity,  were  passion- 
ately loyal  to  their  king  or  lord,  and  were  thrilled  with  a 
poetry  that  rang  with  heroic  adventure. 

Our  Anglo-Saxon  ancestors  had  in  an  eminent  degree 
also  that  passion  which  gives  the  first  impulse  to  litera- 
ture among  a  primitive  people — love  of  glory. 
When  their  first  recorded  epic  hero,  Beowulf,  singers 
has  met  his  death,  and  his  followers  are  re- 
calling his  noble  nature,  they  say  as  their  last  word  that 
"he  was  of  all  world-kings  the  most  desirous  of  praise." 
It  was  not  enough  for  such  men  as  he  that  they  should 
spend  their  lives  in  glorious  adventures;  they  desired  to 
see  their  names  and  their  deeds  spread  among  distant 
peoples  and  handed  down  to  unborn  generations.  Hence 
the  poet,  who  alone  could  insure  this  fame,  was  held  in 
high  esteem.  Two  classes  of  singers  were  recognized: 
first  the  gleeman,  who  did  not  create  his  own  songs,  but 
merely  (like  the  Greek  rhapsodist)  chanted  what  he  had 
learned  from  others;  and,  second,  the  scop,  the  poet 
proper,  who  took  the  crude  material  of  legend  and  ad- 
venture which  lay  about  him  and.  shaped  it  into  lays. 
Sometimes  the  scop  was  permanently  attached  to  the 
court  of  an  aetheling,  or  lord,  was  granted  land  and 
treasure,  and  was  raised  by  virtue  of  his  poetcraft  to 
the  same  position  of  honor  which  the  other  followers  of 
the  astheling  held  by  virtue  of  their  prowess  in  battle. 
Sometimes  he  wandered  from  court  to  court,  depending 


4  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

for  a  hospitable  reception  upon  the  appreciation  of  his 
host  for  the  tales  that  he  chanted  to  the  harp. 

Two  ancient  poems  tell  of  the  fortunes  of  the  scop. 
The  first  of  these,  entitled  Dear's  Lament,  is  perhaps 
the  oldest  Germanic  lyric  poem  in  existence. 
Ifc  stands  almost  alone  in  Old  English  poetry 
in  that  it  is  strophic  in  form  with  a  recurring 
refrain.  In  a  tone  of  brooding,  melancholy  fatalism  the 
poet  consoles  himself  for  his  eclipse  by  a  rival  scop, 
Heorrenda,  and  for  the  loss  of  his  land-right  and  of  the 
royal  favor  by  recalling  the  misfortunes  suffered  by 
heroic  persons  of  the  long  ago.  After  each  brief,  tragic 
recital  he  says:  "That  was  endured,  this  likewise  can 
be."  The  frank  utterance  of  personal  grief,  the  grim, 
mournful  stoicism,  and,  above  all,  the  strophic  structure 
and  the  refrain,  give  the  poem  extraordinary  interest. 

The  second  of  these  poems,  entitled,  from  the  opening 
word,  Widsith,  or  The  Far-Wanderer,  is  a  glorification  of 
the  poet  and  of  the  generosity  of  his  royal 
patrons.  The  poem  begins:  "Widsith  spake, 
unlocked  his  word-hoard;  he  who  had  travelled  through- 
out most  of  the  tribes  and  nations  in  the  world."  Wid- 
sith is  an  imaginary  poet  who  pictures  himself  as  having 
been  at  the  courts  of  all  the  great  kings  and  emperors 
of  both  the  ancient  and  the  Germanic  world.  The 
purpose  seems  to  be  to  show  the  generosity  with  which 
rulers  and  nations  have  always  delighted  to  honor  their 
poets.  After  a  long  list  of  princes  and  peoples — "Attila 
ruled  the  Huns;  Caesar  ruled  the  Greeks;  Offa  ruled  the 
Angles" — Widsith  says:  "Thus  through  many  a  strange 
nation  I  travelled;  therefore  can  I  sing  in  the  mead-hall 
how  kingly  heroes  honored  me  with  gifts."  Then  follows 
a  series  of  nations — "I  was  with  the  Swedes,  the  Danes, 
the  Saracens,  the  Hebrews,  the  Assyrians,  the  Indians, 
the  Medes,  and  the  Persians" — then  a  list  of  kings — 
Eormanric,  Eadwine,  Wulfhere — many  of  whom  are  said 


THE   ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD  5 

to  have  honored  Widsith  with  gold  and  treasure.  "Thus 
the  gleemen  roam  thru  the  wide  world;  they  tell  their 
need  and  say  their  thanks;  always  south  or  north  they 
visit  a  man  prudent  in  speech,  generous  of  gifts,  who  wishes 
praise  to  be  uttered  before  the  warriors,  noble  deeds  to 
be  performed,  till  light  and  life  depart  together;  he  gains 
renown,  he  has  long-lasting  glory."  Whether  or  not  this 
poem  be  as  ancient  as  some  scholars  have  thought,  it 
reveals  the  high  position  occupied  by  the  scop  and  the 
gleemen  in  Germanic  and  especially  in  Anglo-Saxon 
society. 

II 

While  Angles,  Saxons,  and  Jutes  were  still  unknown 
Germanic  tribes,  their  future  island-home  was  being  made 
into  a  province  of  the  Roman  Empire.  The 
very  earliest  inhabitants  of  Britain,  that  mys-  Before  the 
terious  race  which  may  have  raised  the  huge 
circle  of  monoliths  at  Stonehenge,  had  given 
way — how  early  we  do  not  know — to  a  Celtic-speaking 
people.  Before  the  Roman  conquest  this  people  spread 
over  France,  Spain,  and  all  the  British  Islands.  The 
Celts  were  of  an  impetuous  character,  imaginative,  curi- 
ous, and  quick  to  learn.  The  Roman  historians  tell  us 
of  their  eagerness  for  news,  of  their  delight  in  clever 
speech  and  quick  retort.  Their  early  literature  shows  a 
delicate  fancy,  a  kind  of  wild  grace  and  a  love  of  beauty 
for  its  own  sake,  strikingly  in  contrast  with  the  stern  and 
stately  poetry  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  scop.  But  this  very- 
quickness  of  sympathy  and  of  intelligence  proved  fatal 
to  their  existence  as  independent  peoples.  When  the 
Roman  legions  crossed  from  Gaul  to  Britain  there  was  a 
short  space  of  fierce  resistance,  and  then  the  Celts  ac- 
cepted, probably  as  much  from  curiosity  as  from  compul- 
sion, the  imposing  Roman  civilization.  Some  of  the  more 


6  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

stubborn  fled  to  the  fastnesses  of  Wales  and  Scotland,  but 
the  greater  part  seem  to  have  submitted  to  the  Romans, 
as  if  by  a  kind  of  fascination,  even  to  some  extent  giving 
up  their  own  language  for  that  of  their  conquerors.  The 
Romans,  like  the  English  of  our  own  day,  carried 
wherever  they  went  their  splendid  but  somewhat  rigid 
civilization,  and  by  the  end  of  the  fourth  century  England 
was  dotted  with  towns  and  villas  where,  amid  pillared 
porticos,  mosaic  pavements,  marble  baths,  forums,  and 
hippodromes,  a  Roman  emperor  could  find  himself  at 
home. 

This  was  the  state  of  England  when  there  began  that 
remarkable  series  of  movements  on  the  part  of  the  rest- 
less Germanic  tribes  which  we  know  as  the 
Suasions.  "migration."  About  the  end  of  the  fourth 
century,  urged  by  a  common  impulse,  tribe 
after  tribe  swept  westward  across  the  Rhine,  and  south- 
ward across  the  Danube;  some  came  from  the  north  by 
sea,  to  harry  the  coasts  of  Gaul  and  Britain;  some  scaled 
the  Alps,  and  even  the  Pyrenees,  to  batter  at  the  gates 
of  Rome,  or  to  plunder  the  rich  lands  and  islands  of  the 
Mediterranean,  and  to  found  a  kingdom  in  Africa.  The 
Roman  legions  were  recalled  from  Britain  to  guard  the 
imperial  city,  the  Roman  officials  withdrew,  and  the 
Celtic  inhabitants,  weakened  by  three  centuries  of  civi- 
lized life,  and  accustomed  to  rely  for  defense  on  the 
strong  sword  of  the  Roman  soldier,  were  left  to  struggle 
unaided  against  the  savage  raids  of  the  Picts.  and  the 
pirate  bands  of  Jutes,  Saxons,  and  Angles,  which  appeared 
every  spring  in  increasing  numbers  upon  their  coast. 
The  Celts,  however,  did  not  submit  themselves  to  the 
yoke  of  these  savage  Germanic  invaders  as  they  had  done 
to  the  polished  Romans.  Not  long  after  the  year  400  the 
first  band  of  Jutes  landed  on  the  island  of  Thanet  at  the 
invitation  of  the  unwarlike  Celts,  to  defend  the  latter 
against  the  Picts  and  Scots.  Attracted  by  the  wealth 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON    PERIOD  7 

and  fertility  of  the  country,  and  impressed  with  the  help- 
lessness of  its  inhabitants,  the  Jutes  ere  long  turned  from 
allies  to  enemies  far  worse  than  those  against  whom  they 
had  been  employed.  During  the  following  centuries,  in 
steadily  increasing  numbers,  they  fought  their  way  grimly 
from  seacoast  into  interior,  slaying  or  enslaving  the  Celtic 
population,  or  driving  it  before  them  into  the  western 
half  of  the  island,  or  across  the  sea  into  Brittany,  and 
obliterating  all  the  monuments  of  civilization  bequeathed 
by  Rome.  The  native  and  the  Latinized  Celtic  languages 
simply  disappeared  from  the  parts  of  the  island  occupied 
by  the  Anglo-Saxons,  leaving  scarcely  a  trace  on  the 
speech  of  the  conquerors.  A  few  river-names,  Thames, 
Avon,  Cam,  are  Celtic.  Many  place-names  contain  the 
Latin  suffixes  -Chester,  -caster,  and  -wich,  -wick  (Win- 
chester, Lancaster,  Greenwich,  Berwick),  transmitted 
from  Romans  to  English  through  the  Celts. 

During  these  years  of  struggle  there  began  to  grow  up 
about  the  person  of  an  obscure  Celtic  leader  that  cycle 
of  stories  which  was  to  prove  so  fruitful  of 
poetry  both  in  France  and  in  England. — the  Saxon? 
legends  of  Arthur,  founder  of  the  Round 
Table,  and  defender  of  the  western  Britons  against  the 
weakening  power  of  Rome  and  the  growing  fury  of  the 
barbarians.  As  the  Angles  and  Saxons  spread  later  over 
the  western  part  of  England,  they  seem  to  have  absorbed 
the  remaining  inhabitants,  who  communicated  to  the  con- 
quering race  its  first  leaven;  they  made  it  later  more  sen- 
sitive and  receptive,  and  gave  it  a  touch  of  extravagance 
and  gayety,  which,  after  being  reinforced  by  similar  ele- 
ments in  the  temperament  of  the  Norman-French  in- 
vaders, was  to  blossom  in  the  sweet  humor  of  Chaucer,  in 
the  rich  fancy  of  Spenser,  and  in  the  broad  humanity  of 
Shakespeare. 

During  the  long  period  of  ruthless  conquest  and  un- 
organized settlement  by  the  Angles,  Saxons,  and  Jutes, 


8  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

there  were  growing  slowly  a  number  of  little  national 
groups  among  the  conquerors;  and  after  the  year  600, 
with  the  appearance  of  four  great  kingdoms 
in  Kent>  Northumbria,  Mercia,  and  Wessex, 
each  of  which  in  turn  assumed  a  more  power- 
ful and  enduring  leadership,  there  followed  more  settled 
conditions,  under  which  civilization  and  literature  could 
flourish.  Missionaries,  schools,  and  monasteries  not  only 
converted  the.  pagan  Anglo-Saxons  to  Christianity,  but 
they  also  made  possible  familiarity  with  both  the  religious 
and  the  secular  literature  which  circulated  on  the  conti- 
nent; they  may  perhaps  have  made  possible  the  composi- 
tion of  such  a  long  and  stately  epic  poem  as  that  most 
remarkable  literary  relic  of  early  Germanic  literature, 
Beowulf.  Further,  the  monastic  scribe  was  the  agent  who 
for  the  first  time  could  record  and  preserve  both  tradi- 
tional and  contemporary  poetry,  which  till  then  had  been 
only  precariously  transmitted  through  the  memories  of 
gleemen,  and  circulated  only  as  they  sang  before  the 
nobles  in  the  mead-hall. 

It  was  not  till  about  700  that  the  long  poem  entitled, 

from  its  hero,  Beowulf,  was  composed  in  its  present  form. 

"Beowulf"      ^  *s  sometnmS  over  three  thousand  lines  in 

length,  and  though  consisting  of  two  separate 

adventures,  constitutes  an  artistic  literary  whole. 

Hrothgar,  king  of  the  Danes,  has  built  near  the  sea  a 
magnificent  hall,  named  Heorot,  where  he  sits  with  his 
thanes  at  the  mead- drinking,  and  listens  to 
tne  chanting  of  the  gleemen.  For  a  while  he 
lives  in  happiness,  and  is  known  far  and  wide 
as  a  splendid  and  liberal  prince.  But  one  night  there 
comes  from  the  march-land,  the  haunt  of  all  unearthly 
and  malign  creatures,  a  terrible  monster  named  Grendel. 
Entering  the  mead-hall  he  slays  thirty  of  the  sleeping 
Danes,  and  carries  their  corpses  away  to  his  lair.  The 
next  night  the  same  thing  is  repeated.  No  mortal  power 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON  PERIOD  9 

seems  able  to  cope  with  the  gigantic  foe.  In  the  winter 
nights  Grendel  couches  in  the  splendid  hall,  defiling  all 
its  bright  ornaments.  For  twelve  years  this  scourge 
afflicts  the  Danes,  until  Hrothgar's  spirit  is  broken. 

At  last  the  story  of  Grendel's  deeds  crosses  the  sea  to 
Gautland,  where  the  stalwart  Beowulf  dwells  with  his 
uncle,  King  Hygelac.  He  determines  to  go 
to  Hrothgar's  assistance.  With  fourteen  com- 
panions  he  embarks:  "Departed  then  over  the 
billowy  sea  the  foamy-necked  floater,  most  like  to  a  bird." 
The  next  day  the  voyagers  catch  sight  of  the  promon- 
tories of  Hrothgar's  land;  and  soon,  from  the  top  of  the 
cliffs,  they  behold  in  the  vale  beneath  them  the  famous 
hall,  "rich  and  gold- variegated,  most  glorious  of  dwellings 
under  the  firmament."  The  young  heroes  in  their  "shin- 
ing war  byrnies"  (coats  of  ring-mail),  and  with  their 
spears  like  a  "gray  ash-forest,"  are  ushered  into  the  hall 
' '  where  Hrothgar  sits,  old  and  gray,  amid  his  band  of 
nobles."  Beowulf  craves  permission  to  cleanse  Heorot, 
and  Hrothgar  consents  that  the  Gauts  shall  abide  Gren- 
del's coming  in  the  hall  that  night.  Meanwhile,  until 
darkness  draws  on,  the  thanes  of  Hrothgar  and  the  fol- 
lowers of  Beowulf  sit  drinking  mead,  "the  bright  sweet 
liquor,"  and  listening  to  the  songs  of  the  gleeman.  The 
feast  draws  to  a  close  when  Wealtheow,  Hrothgar's  queen, 
after  solemnly  handing  the  mead-cup  to  her  lord  and  to 
Beowulf,  and  bidding  them  "be  blithe  at  the  beer-drink- 
ing," goes  through  the  hall  distributing  gifts  among  the 
thanes.  The  king,  queen,  and  their  followers  then  with- 
draw to  another  building  for  the  night,  while  Beowulf 
and  his  men  lie  down  to  wait  for  the  coming  of  Grendel. 
All  fall  asleep  except  Beowulf,  who  ''awaits  in  angry 
mood  the  fate  of  the  battle." 

The  coming  of  the  monster  is  described  vividly:  "Then 
came  from  the  moors,  under  the  misty  hills,  Grendel 
stalking.  .  .  .  The  door,  fast  with  fire-hardened  bands, 


10  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

burst  open.  On  the  many-colored  floor  the  foe  trod; 
he  went,  wroth  of  mood;  from  his  eyes  stood  a  horrid 
light  like  flame.  ...  He  saw  in  the  hall 
many  warriors  sleeping,  a  kindred  band.  .  .  . 
Then  his  heart  laughed."  He  seizes  one  of 
the  warriors,  bites  his  "bone- joints,"  drinks  the  blood 
from  his  veins,  and  greedily  devours  him  even  to  the 
hands  and  feet.  "Nearer  he  stepped,  seized  a  stout- 
hearted warrior  in  his  bed."  That  warrior,  the  strength 
of  thirty  men  in  his  hand-grip,  seizes  Grendel.  Terror- 
stricken,  the  monster  turns  to  flee,  but  is  held  by  the 
strength  of  Beowulf.  The  other  warriors,  awakened  by 
the  combat  and  the  "song  of  terror  sung  by  God's  adver- 
sary," try  to  help  with  their  swords,  but  no  mortal 
weapon  can  wound  Grendel.  At  last  the  monster 
wrenches  his  own  arm  from  its  socket  and  flees  to  his 
lair  to  die,  leaving  Beowulf  to  nail  the  grisly  trophy  in 
triumph  above  the  door  of  Heorot. 

In  the  morning  there  is  great  rejoicing.  The  king,  with 
the  queen  and  her  company  of  maidens,  comes  through 
the  meadows  to  gaze  in  wonder  on  the  huge  arm  and 
claw  nailed  beneath  the  gold  roof  of  the  hall.  When  the 
evening  feast  begins,  Beowulf  sits  between  the  two  sons 
of  the  king  and  receives  the  precious  gifts^— jewels,  rings, 
and  a  golden  necklace — which  the  queen  presents  to  him. 
But  after  nightfall  Grendel's  mother  comes  to  take  ven- 
geance for  her  son.  She  seizes  one  of  Hrothgar's  nobles, 
.^Eschere,  and  bears  him  away  to  her  watery  den. 

Beowulf  promises  to  pursue  the  new  foe  to  the  bottom 
of  her  fen-pool.  With  Hrothgar  and  a  band  of  followers 
he  marches  along  the  cliffs  and  windy  prom- 
ontories  which  bound  the  moor  on  the  sea- 
the  Sea.  ward  side,  until  he  comes  to  Grendel's  lair. 
It  is  a  sea-pool,  shut  in  by  precipitous  rocks, 
and  overhung  by  the  shaggy  trunks  and  aged  writhen 
boughs  of  a  "joyless  wood."  Trembling  passers-by  have 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON  PERIOD  II 

seen  fire  fleeting  on  the  waves  at  night,  and  the  hart 
wearied  by  the  hounds  will  lie  down  and  die  on  these 
banks  rather  than  plunge  into  the  unholy  waters.  The 
pool  is  so  deep  that  it  is  an  hour  before  Beowulf  reaches 
the  bottom.  Snakes  and  beasts  of  the  shining  deep 
attack  him  as  he  descends.  At  last  he  finds  himself  in  a 
cave  where  the  " mere-wife"  is  lurking,  and  a  deadly 
struggle  begins.  Once  the  giantess  throws  Beowulf  to 
the  ground,  and  sitting  astride  his  body  draws  out  her 
broad,  short  knife  to  despatch  him;  but  his  coat  of  ring- 
mail  saves  him,  and  with  a  superhuman  effort  he  strug- 
gles up  again,  throws  away  his  broken  sword,  and  seizes 
from  a  heap  of  arms  a  magic  blade,  forged  by  giants  of 
old  time;  with  it  he  hews  off  the  head  of  Grendel's  mother, 
and  then  that  of  Grendel,  whose  dead  body  he  finds  lying 
in  the  cave.  So  poisonous  is  the  blood  of  Grendel  that 
it  melts  the  metal  of  the  blade,  leaving  only  the  hilt  in 
Beowulf's  hand.  When  he  reappears  with  his  trophies 
at  the  surface  of  the  water,  all  except  his  own  thanes 
have  given  him  up  for  dead  and  have  returned  home. 
Great  is  the  jubilation  when  the  hero  appears  at  Heorot 
with  his  companions  and  throws  upon  the  floor  of  the 
mead-hall  the  huge  head,  which  four  men  can  hardly 
carry. 

The  second  great  episode  of  the  poem  is  Beowulf's 
fight  with  the  Dragon  of  the  Gold-Hoard.     Beowulf  has 
been  reigning  as  king  for  fifty  years  and  is 
now  an  old  man,  when  calamity  comes  upon     ^ee°J^  and 
him  and  his  people  in  the  form  of  a  dragon,     Dragon, 
which  flies  by  night  enveloped  in  fire;  and 
which,  in  revenge  for  the  theft  of  a  gold  cup  from  its 
precious   hoard,    burns   the   king's   hall.     Old  as  he  is, 
Beowulf  fights  the  dragon  single-handed.     He  slays  the 
monster  in  its  lair,  but  himself  receives  his  mortal  hurt. 

The  death  of  the  old  king  is  picturesque  and  moving. 
He  bids  his  thane  bring  out  from  the  dragon's  den  "the 


12  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

gold-treasure,  the  jewels,  the  curious  gems,"  in  order  that 
death  may  be  softer  to  him,  seeing  the  wealth  he  has 
gained  for  his  people.  Wiglaf,  entering  the 
cave  of  t*16  "old  twilight-flier,"  sees  ''dishes 
standing,  vessels  of  men  of  yore,  footless,  their 
ornaments  fallen  away;  there  was  many  a  helm  old  and 
rusty,  and  many  armlets  cunningly  fastened,"  and  over 
the  hoard  droops  a  magic  banner,  "all  golden,  locked  by 
arts  of  song,"  from  which  a  light  is  shed  over  the  treasure. 
Beowulf  gazes  with  dying  eyes  upon  the  precious  things; 
then  he  asks  that  his  thanes  build  for  him  a  funeral  bar- 
row on  a  promontory  of  the  sea,  which  the  sailors,  as 
they  "drive  their  foaming  barks  from  afar  over  the  mists 
of  floods,  may  see  and  name  Beowulf's  Mount." 

This  is  only  a  summary.     The  poem  itself,  however,  is 

composed  with  a  solid  background  of  detailed  realism. 

We  see  vividly  the  courtly  manners  and  cus- 

J^?  toms  of  the  royal  and  the  noble  personages, 

Reflected  in  ,      J       ,  ...  if.,, 

Beowulf.  the  engraved  swords,  the  boar-helmets  and 
the  "woven  ring-mail"  of  the  warriors,  the 
benches  and  tables  of  the  "antler-broad  hall,"  the  ser- 
vants pouring  the  bright  mead;  we  hear  the  stately,  elo- 
quent speeches,  the  scop's  clear  song;  we  feel  the  high 
loyalty  of  thanes  and  of  kinsmen  to  their  lord,  the  faith- 
fulness and  generosity  of  the  king  to  his  retainers. 

Although  the  poem  was  composed  in  its  present  form 
in  England  early  in  the  eighth  century,  the  subject  mat- 
ter is  not  English.     The  places  and  the  peo- 
9thfr  „  pies  are  in  Denmark  and  Sweden.     The  man- 

Anglo-Saion      v 

Epics.  ners,  the  customs,  the  civilization,  seem  to  be 

those  of  all  the  Germanic  nations,  as  also  the 
famous  historical  and  legendary  events  which  are  fre- 
quently alluded  to  throughout  the  poem.  These  great 
persons  and  their  heroic  or  tragic  adventures,  many  of 
which  are  mentioned  also  in  Widsith,  are  the  heritage  of 
all  Germania.  That,  besides  Beowulf,  other  epic  poems 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD  13 

on  these  adventures  were  composed  in  Anglo-Saxon,  we 
have  direct  evidence  in  the  form  of  fragments  of  two 
poems,  one  of  them  dealing  with  a  story  mentioned  in 
Beowulf — the  war  between  Finn  and  Hnaef — the  other 
consisting  of  two  short  passages  from  a  poem  of  which 
we  have  several  complete  versions  in  continental  lan- 
guages— the  story  of  Waldere. 

The  structure  of  Anglo-Saxon  poetry  is  quite  different 
from  that  of  modern  English  poetry.  The  metrical  unit 
is  the  single  line,  which  regularly  consists  of 
four  strongly  accented  syllables,  with  an  un- 
fixed  number  of  unaccented  syllables.  This 
line  is  divided  into  two  half-lines,  each  with  two  strong 
accents.  Two  or  three  of  the  accented  syllables  of  the 
line  begin  with  the  same  consonant  sound — that  is,  they 
alliterate;  the  first  accent  of  the  second  half-line  is  always 
alliterative.  Rhyme  is  very  rare.  The  following  bit  of 
vivid  description  (of  Grendel's  haunts)  is  taken  from 
Beowulf: 

hie  dygel  lond 

Ti'arigeath,  wulf-hleothu,         windige  naessas, 
/recne  /en-gelad,         thaer  /yrgen-stream 
under  naessa  gempu         wither  gewiteth, 
/I6d  under  /oldan.         Nis  thaet  /eor  heonon. 

[A  secret  land 

They  haunt,  wolf-slopes,        windy  headlands, 
Fearful  fen-paths,         where  the  mountain-stream 
Under  the  shadows  of  cliffs         downward  departs, 
The  flood  beneath  the  earth.          That  is  not  far  hence.] 


Ill 

The  immediate  influence  of  the  Romanized  Celtic 
people  and  their  civilization  on  the  Anglo-Saxons  was 
almost  nothing.  From  such  a  poem  as  The  Ruin,  a  mel- 
ancholy lament  over  the  crumbling  towers  and  the  fallen 


14  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

walls  of  an  abandoned  city,  we  may  guess  at  the  utter 
devastation  wrought  in  the  earlier  period  by  the  armies 
of  the  invaders.  What  influence  the  Celts  exerted  was 
indirect,  and  appeared  chiefly  in  the  fields  of  learning  and 
religion. 

Christianity    came    into    England    in    two    different 
streams,  one  from  Rome,  one  from  Ireland,   the  latter 

having  been  converted  from  heathenism  sev- 
The  Chris-  era]  centuries  before.  The  first  stream  began 
E^S^d.0  late  in  the  sixth  century,  with  the  coming  of 

Augustine  to  Kent.  Little  by  little,  after  the 
advent  of  this  great  missionary  in  the  south  of  England, 
the  new  creed  drove  out  the  old,  whining  its  way  by 
virtue  of  its  greater  ideality  and  the  authority  with 
which  it  spoke  of  man's  existence  beyond  the  grave. 
This  stream  of  religious  influence,  which  came  from 
Rome,  overran  south  and  central  England.  It  produced 
some  schools  of  learning,  but  almost  no  English  literature. 
The  second  stream  of  Christian  influence  swept  into 
Northumbria  through  the  labors  of  the  Irish  missionaries, 
who  were  carrying  their  creed  at  the  same  time  into 
France,  Spain,  Germany,  and  Switzerland.  Eventually, 
at  the  Synod  of  Whitby  (664),  the  Celtic  ecclesiastical 
usages  of  the  north  were  discarded  in  favor  of  the 
Roman  and  England  was  thus  kept  in  closer  touch  with 
the  intellectual  and  religious  life  of  the  continent.  It  is, 
nevertheless,  to  the  north  and  east  that  we  must  look  for 
the  first  blossomings  of  Christian  poetry  in  England. 

Of  all  the  monasteries  which  were  founded  in  Northum- 
bria  by  the  Celtic  missionaries  from  Ireland,   two  are 

most  famous  because  of  their  connection  with 
c2dm^d  literature — Jarrow  and  Whitby.  At  Jarrow 

lived  and  died  Baeda,  known  as  the  ''Vener- 
able Bede,"  a  gentle,  laborious  scholar  in  whom  all  the 
learning  of  Northumbria  was  summed  up.  He  wrote 
many  books,  all  but  one  in  Latin,  the  most  notable  being 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD  15 

(in  Latin)  the  Ecclesiastical  History  of  the  English  People 
(Historia  Ecdesiastica  Gentis  Anglorum).  It  is  from  a 
passage  in  this  book  that  we  learn  the  story  of  Caedmon, 
the  earliest  known  poet  of  Christian  England.  He  was 
a  humble  and  illiterate  laboring  man  who  lived  near 
Whitby  at  the  end  of  the  seventh  century.  Bede  tells  us 
that  at  the  feast,  when  the  harp  was  passed  round  for 
each  to  sing  in  turn,  Caedmon  would  rise  and  go  to  his 
house,  because  he  knew  nothing  of  the  gleeman's  art. 
But  one  night,  when  he  had  thus  left  the  cheerful  com- 
pany and  gone  to  the  stable  to  tend  the  cattle,  he  fell 
asleep  and  had  a  wonderful  dream.  A  figure  stood  be- 
side him,  saying:  "Caedmon,  sing  to  me."  Caedmon 
answered:  "Behold,  I  know  not  how  to  sing,  and  there- 
fore I  left  the  feast  to-night."  "Nevertheless,  sing  now 
to  me,"  the  figure  said.  "What  shall  I  sing?"  asked 
Caedmon.  "Sing  the  beginning  of  created  things,"  was 
the  answer.  Then  in  his  dream  Caedmon  phrased  some 
verses  of  the  Creation,  which  in  the  morning  he  could 
remember.  News  of  the  wonderful  gift  which  had  been 
vouchsafed  to  the  unschooled  man  was  carried  to  Hild, 
the  abbess  of  the  foundation,  and  she  commanded  por- 
tions of  the  Scripture  to  be  read  to  him,  that  he  might 
paraphrase  them  into  verse.  So  it  was  done;  and  from 
this  time  on  Caedmon's  life  was  given  to  his  heaven- 
appointed  task  of  turning  the  Old  Testament  narratives 
into  song. 

The  poems  which  formerly  were  attributed  to  Caedmon 
(though  not  now  regarded  as  his)  consist  of  paraphrases 
of  parts  of  Genesis,  of  Exodus,  and  of  Daniel. 
Sometimes,  especially  in  dealing  with  a  war- 
like  episode,  the  poet  expands  his  matter 
freely,  treating  it  with  all  the  vigor  and  picturesqueness 
of  the  Germanic  poetry  of  war.  In  Exodus,  for  instance, 
the  most  vivid  and  original  passages  are  those  which  tell 
of  the  overwhelming  of  Pharaoh's  host  in  the  Red  Sea. 


Ib  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  Egyptians  and  the  Israelitish  armies  are  described 
with  a  heathen  scop's  delight  in  the  pomp  and  circum- 
stance of  battle,  and  the  disaster  which  overtakes  the 
Egyptian  hosts  is  sung  with  martial  vigor. 

If  we  know  little  of  Caedmon's  life,  we  know  still  less 
of  that  of  Cynewulf,  a  poet  living  a  century  later,  who 
c  ewulf  was  PernaPs  tne  Sreatest  of  the  Anglo-Saxon 

poets,  if  we  except  the  unknown  bard  who 
composed  Beowulf.  We  have,  signed  with  Cynewulf's 
name  in  runes,  two  lives  of  saints,  and  a  poem  dealing 
with  Christ's  ascension.  One  other  poem  has  been 
ascribed  to  him  with  some  probability,  Andreas,  a  very 
lively  and  naive  story  of  a  saint's  martyrdom  and  final 
triumph  over  his  enemies. 

One  of  the  most  curious  and  most  interesting  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  poems  is  a  collection  of  Riddles.  Riddles, 

which  in  the  middle  ages  were  considered  a 

The  Riddles.  ,  i»      •«'•-«•  <•  i  i 

much  more  dignified  literary  form  than  they 
are  to-day,  when  we  relegate  them  to  children  and  the 
"folk,"  had  a  wide  European  circulation.  The  Old 
English  poet  has  treated  his  subjects  with  imagination 
and  picturesqueness.  The  new  moon  is  a  young  viking, 
sailing  through  the  skies  in  his  pirate  ship,  laden  with 
spoils  of  battle,  to  build  a  citadel  for  himself  in  highest 
heaven;  but  the  sun,  a  greater  warrior,  drives  him  away 
and  seizes  his  land,  until  the  night  conquers  the  sun  in 
turn.  The  iceberg  shouts  and  laughs  as  it  plunges 
through  the  wintry  sea,  eager  to  crush  the  fleet  of  hostile 
ships.  The  sword  in  its  scabbard  is  a  mailed  fighter,  who 
dashes  exultingly  into  the  battle-play,  and  then  is  sad 
because  women  upbraid  him  over  the  fate  of  the  heroes 
he  has  slam. 

The  Phoenix,  a  poem  with  a  Latin  original,  derives  a 
special  interest  from  the  fact  that  it  is  the  only  Anglo- 
Saxon  poem  of  any  length  which  shows  a  delight  in 
the  soft  and  radiant  moods  of  nature,  as  opposed  to 


TEE   ANGLO-SAXON  PERIOD  17 

her  fierce  and  grim  aspects.  In  the  land  where  the 
Phoenix  dwells  "the  groves  are  all  behung  with  blos- 
soms ...  the  boughs  upon  the  trees  are  ever 
laden,  the  fruit  is  aye  renewed  through  all  pSnix." 
eternity."  The  music  of  the  wonderful  bird, 
as  it  goes  aloft  "to  meet  that  gladsome  gem,  God's  can- 
dle," is  "sweeter  and  more  beauteous  than  any  art  of 
song."  When  the  thousand  years  of  its  life  are  done,  it 
flies  away  to  a  lonely  Syrian  wood,  and  builds  its  own 
holocaust  of  fragrant  herbs,  which  the  sun  kindles.  Out 
of  the  ashes  a  new  Phoenix  is  born,  "richly  dight  with 
plumage,  as  it  was  at  first,  radiantly  adorned,"  and  flies 
back  to  its  home  in  the  enchanted  land  of  summer.  At 
the  end  the  history  of  the  bird  is  interpreted  as  an  alle- 
gory of  the  death  and  resurrection  of  Christ,  and  of  his 
ascent  to  heaven  amid  the  ministering  company  of  saints. 
The  poem  has  a  fervor  and  enthusiasm  lacking  to  the 
Latin  original,  and  is  the  work  of  a  good  poet.  It  has 
been  pointed  out  that  the  fanciful  description  of  the  bird's 
home-land  is  remarkably  reminiscent  of  the  old  Celtic 
tales  about  the  Land  of  Eternal  Youth;  and  certainly  it 
is  not  difficult  to  see,  in  the  bright  colors  and  happy  fancy 
of  the  poem,  the  working  of  the  Celtic  imagination,  as 
well  as  the  transforming  touch  of  hope  which  had  been 
brought  into  men's  lives  by  Christianity. 

Besides  the  poetry  attributed  to  Casdmon  and  to  (slyne- 
wulf  and  their  schools,  there  exist  a  few  short  poems, 
lyrics,  or  "dramatic  lyrics,"  of  the  greatest 
interest.  One  of  these,  called  The  Wife's 
Lament,  gives  us  a  glimpse  of  one  of  the  harsh  customs 
of  our  ancestors.  A  wife,  accused  of  faithlessness,  has 
been  banished  from  her  native  village,  and  compelled  to 
live  alone  in  the  forest;  from  her  place  of  exile  she  pours 
out  her  moan  to  the  husband  who  has  been  estranged 
from  her  by  false  slanderers.  The  Lover's  Message  is 
a  kind  of  companion  piece  to  this.  The  speaker  in  the 


Ib  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

little  poem  is  the  tablet  of  wood  upon  which  an  absent 
lover  has  carved  a  message  to  send  to  his  beloved.  It 
tells  her  that  he  has  now  a  home  for  her  in  the  south, 
and  bids  her,  as  soon  as  she  hears  the  cuckoo  chanting 
of  his  sorrow  in  the  copsewood,  to  take  sail  over  the 
ocean  pathway  to  her  lord,  who  waits  and  longs  for  her. 
These  are  the  first  two  little  love-poems  in  English. 

Three  other  poems  require  brief  mention.  In  The  Sea- 
farer the  poet,  after  describing  the  bitter  misery  of  the 
sailor's  life  amidst  winter  storms,  confesses  the  prevailing 
Anglo-Saxon  passion  in  a  declaration  that  the  charm  of 
his  life  outweighs  all  the  attractions  of  a  warm  and  com- 
fortable home  on  the  shore.  The  Dream  of  the  Rood  is 
an  intensely  emotional  vision  of  the  cross  on  which  the 
Saviour  died.  The  wonderful  and  glorious  tree  itself 
speaks,  telling  the  story  of  the  crucifixion,  and  the 
dreamer  replies  with  a  confession  of  the  wretchedness  of 
his  sins,  and  of  the  redeeming  power  of  the  cross. 

The  longest  and  most  perfect  in  form  of  these  half- 
lyrical  elegies  or  poems  of  sentiment  is  The  Wandered 

It  is  a  mournful  plaint  by  one  who  must 
Wtmderer."  "travel  o'er  the  water-track,  stir  with  his 

hands  the  rime-cold  sea,  and  struggle  on  the 
paths  of  exile,"  while  he  muses  upon  the  joys  and  glories 
of  a  life  that  has  passed  away  forever.  "Often,"  he  says, 
"it  seems  to  him  in  fancy  as  if  he  clasps  and  kisses  his 
lord,  and  on  his  knees  lays  hand  and  head,  even  as  ere- 
while";  but  he  soon  wakes  friendless,  and  sees  before  him 
only  "the  fallow  waves,  sea-birds  bathing  and  spreading 
their  wings,  falling  hoar-frost  and  snow  mingled  with 
hail."  Rapt  away  again  by  his  longing,  he  beholds  his 
friends  and  kinsmen  hovering  before  him  in  the  air;  he 
"greets  them  with  snatches  of  song,  he  scans  them 
eagerly,  comrades  of  heroes;  soon  they  swim  away  again; 
the  sailor-souls  do  not  bring  hither  many  old  familiar 
songs."  And  at  the  close  the  Wanderer  breaks  out  with 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD  IQ 

a  lament  over  the  departed  glories  of  a  better  time: 
"Where  is  gone  the  horse?  Where  is  gone  the  hero? 
Where  is  gone  the  giver  of  treasure?  Where  are  gone 
the  seats  of  the  feast?  Where  are  the  joys  of  the  hall? 
Ah,  thou  bright  cup  !  Ah,  thou  mailed  warrior !  Ah,  the 
prince's  glory !  How  has  the  time  passed  away  ...  as 
if  it  had  not  been!"  There  is  a  wistful  sadness  and  a 
lyric  grace  in  this  poem  which  suggests  once  more  the 
Celtic  leaven  at  work  in  the  vehement  Anglo-Saxon 
genius.  It  suggests,  too,  a  state  of  society  fallen  into 
ruin,  a  time  of  disaster.  Perhaps,  before  it  was  written, 
such  a  time  had  come  for  England,  and  especially  for 
Northumbria. 

While  the  Anglo-Saxons  had  been  settling  down  in 
England  to  a  life  of  agriculture,  their  pagan  kinsmen  who 
remained  on  the  continent  had  continued  to 
lead  their  wild  freebooting  life  on  the  sea.  invasions*11 
Toward  the  end  of  the  eighth  century  bands 
of  Danes  began  to  harass  the  English  coasts.  Northum- 
bria, the  seat  and  centre  of  English  learning,  at  first  bore 
the  main  force  of  their  attacks.  The  very  monastery  of 
Jarrow,  in  which  Baeda  had  written  his  Ecclesiastical  His- 
tory, was  plundered,  and  its  inhabitants  put  to  the  sword. 
The  monastery  of  Whitby,  where  Caedmon  had  had  his 
vision,  was  only  temporarily  saved  by  the  fierce  resistance 
of  the  monks.  By  the  middle  of  the  ninth  century  the 
Danes  had  made  themselves  masters  of  Northumbria, 
and  the  flourishing  Anglo-Saxon  civilization,  the  schools, 
the  literature,  were  blotted  out.  The  Danes  were  such 
men  as  the  Angles,  Jutes,  and"  Saxons  had  been  four  hun- 
dred years  before — worshippers  of  the  old  gods,  ruthless 
assailants  of  a  religion,  literature,  and  society  which  they 
did  not  understand.  In  Wessex  the  heroism  of  King 
Alfred  (871-901)  turned  back  the  tide  of  warlike  invad- 
ers. The  Danes,  in  accordance  with  the  terms  of  their 
truce,  settled  thickly  in  the  north  and  east,  and  three 


20  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

centuries  later  we  find  the  language  of  those  districts 
containing  many  words  borrowed  from  the  Scandinavian 
settlers,  but  until  the  Norman  conquest,  two  centuries 
later,  the  only  literature  which  remains  to  us  was  pro- 
duced in  Wessex.  It  is  almost  entirely  a  literature  of 
prose;  the  best  of  it  was  the  work  of  King  Alfred  himself, 
or  produced  under  his  immediate  encouragement. 

As  a  child  King  Alfred  had  seen  Rome,  and  had  lived 
for  a  time  at  the  great  court  of  Charles  the  Bald  in 
Kin  Aifr  d  France;  and  the  spectacle  of  these  older  and 
richer  civilizations  had  filled  him  with  a 
desire  to  give  to  his  struggling  subjects  something  of  the 
heritage  of  the  past.  When,  after  a  long,  desperate  war- 
fare, he  had  won  peace  from  the  Danes,  he  called  about 
him  learned  monks  from  the  sheltered  monasteries  of 
Ireland  and  Wales,  and  made  welcome  at  his  court  all 
strangers  who  could  bring  him  a  manuscript  or  sing  to 
him  an  old  song.  He  spurred  on  his  priests  and  bishops 
to  write.  He  himself  learned  a  little  Latin,  in  order 
that  he  might  translate  into  the  West-Saxon  tongue  cer- 
tain books  which  he  believed  would  be  most  useful  and 
interesting  to  Englishmen,  putting  down  the  sense,  he 
says,  "sometimes  word  for  word,  sometimes  meaning  for 
meaning,  as  I  had  learned  it  from  Plegmund,  my  arch- 
bishop, and  Asser,  my  bishop,  and  Grimbald,  my  mass- 
priest,  and  John,  my  mass-priest."  He  selected  for  trans- 
lation a  famous  and  influential  philosophical  work  of  the 
middle  ages,  the  Consolation  of  Philosophy  of  Boethius;  a 
manual  of  universal  history  and  geography  by  Orosius; 
and  a  treatise  on  the  duties  of  priests  and  learned  men, 
the  Pastoral  Care  or  " Shepherd's  Book"  of  Gregory, 
copies  of  which  he  sent  to  all  his  bishops  in  order  that 
they  and  their  priests  might  learn  to  be  better  shepherds 
of  their  flocks.  More  important  still,  he  seems  to  have 
been  the  one  who  caused  to  be  translated  Baeda's  Ec- 
clesiastical History,  thus  giving  a  native  English  dress  to 


THE  ANGLO-SAXON   PERIOD  21 

the  first  great  piece  of  historical  writing  which  had  been 
done  in  England.  Lastly,  he  appears  to  have  aided  in 
the  collection  of  the  dry  entries  of  the  deaths  of  kings 
and  the  installations  of  bishops,  which  the  monks  of 
various  monasteries  were  in  the  habit  of  making  on  the 
Easter  rolls;  this  was  expanded  into  a  clear  and  pictur- 
esque narrative,  the  greatest  space,  of  course,  being  taken 
up  with  the  events  of  his  own  reign.  This,  known  as 
the  Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle,  is  the  oldest  monument  of 
English  prose,  and  is,  with  one  exception  (the  Gothic 
Gospels),  the  most  venerable  piece  of  extended  prose 
writing  in  a  modern  European  language. 

Nevertheless,  despite  all  his  efforts,  King  Alfred  does 
not  seem  to  have  succeeded  in  recreating  a  vital  native 
literature  in  England.     The  sermons  or  Homi- 
lies of  the  eloquent  and  devoted  /Elfric  (1000),     ***** 

,  ,  ,      ,  .  ii»      Anglo-Saxon 

however,  here  and  there  rise  to  the  rank  of  Literature, 
literature,  by  reason  of  the  picturesqueness 
of  some  religious  legend  which  they  treat,  by  the  fervor 
of  their  piety,  and  by  reason  of  their  clear,  vivid,  flow- 
ing style.  The  Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle,  also,  which  con- 
tinued to  grow  in  the  monasteries  of  Peterborough,  Win- 
chester, and  Ely,  here  and  there  records  a  bit  of  ringing 
verse.  One  of  these  poetic  passages,  known  as  the  Battle 
of  Bmnanburh,  is  entered  under  the  year  937.  Another 
late  poem,  the  Death  of  Byrtnoth,  also  called  the  Battle  of 
Maldon,  bears  the  date  991.  These  are  both  accounts 
of  stubborn  and  heroic  battles  by  the  English  against 
the  Danes.  The  latter  is  the  swan-song  of  Anglo-Saxon 
poetry. 

In  passing  judgment  on  Anglo-Saxon  literature  we 
must  remember  that  the  fragmentary  survivals  unques- 
tionably represent  only  in  the  most  imperfect  way  what 
must  at  one  time  have  been  a  rich  and  extensive  litera- 
ture. Ancient  poetry  and  prose  could  be  preserved  only 
if  written  down,  and  then  only  if  the  manuscripts  them- 


22  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

selves  survived  the  ravages  of  accident  and  time.  The 
two  centuries  of  devastation  wrought  by  the  Danes,  es- 
pecially to  the  flourishing  culture  of  North- 
Survival  of  umbria  and  Mercia,  devastation  which  was 
Literature.011  marked  by  the  burning  and  plundering  of 
monasteries,  almost  the  only  safe  and  perma- 
nent depositaries  for  manuscripts,  resulted,  as  King  Alfred 
complains,  in  the  almost  complete  destruction  of  written 
literature.  Six  hundred  years  later,  at  the  dissolution  of 
the  English  monasteries,  their  libraries  again  were  almost 
totally  destroyed,  and  it  was  only  through  the  activities 
of  a  few  enthusiastic  antiquaries  that  any  of  the  literary 
monuments  from  the  manuscript  period  were  saved  from 
vandalism.  Only  four  manuscripts  containing  Anglo- 
Saxon  poetry  are  extant — one  in  the  cathedral  at  Vercelli, 
Italy;  one  in  the  cathedral  at  Exeter;  one  at  Oxford,  and 
one  in  London.  For  the  most  part  we  must  reconstruct 
with  the  eye  and  ear  of  imagination  the  stately  and  heroic 
songs  which  thrilled  the  hearts  of  kings  and  warriors,  of 
clerks  and  peasants,  in  every  hall  and  hamlet  of  England 
for  six  centuries  before  the  coming  of  the  Normans. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD 

THE  Normans  ("North-men"),  a  group  of  Scandina- 
vian sea-rovers  who  settled  in  northwestern  France  about 
900,  were  an  extraordinary  people.  While 
many  of  their  fellows  were  invading  and  set- 
tling  in  England,  they  appeared  off  the  coast 
of  France;  and  under  their  leader,  Hrolf  the  Ganger 
(the  "Walker"),  they  pushed  up  the  Seine  in  their  black 
boats,  wasting  and  burning  to  the  very  gates  of  Paris. 
The  French  won  peace  by  granting  them  the  broad  and 
rich  lands  in  the  northwest,  known  henceforth  as  Nor- 
mandy. Unlike  the  other  northern  peoples,  they  showed 
a  remarkable  ability  to  retain  their  own  individuality 
while  assimilating  the  southern  civilization.  They  mar- 
ried with  the  French  women,  and  adopted  French  man- 
ners and  the  French  tongue.  In  a  little  over  a  century 
they  had  grown  from  a  barbarous  horde  of  sea-robbers 
into  the  most  polished  and  brilliant  people  of  Europe, 
whose  power  was  felt  even  in  the  Mediterranean  and  the 
Far  East.  They  united  in  a  remarkable  way  impetuous 
daring  and  cool  practical  sense.  Without  losing  anything 
of  their  northern  bravery  in  war,  they  absorbed  all  the 
southern  suppleness  and  wit,  all  the  southern  love  of 
splendor  and  art,  and  moreover  developed  a  genius  for 
organizing  and  conducting  their  government.  Before  the 
battle  of  Hastings  the  Anglo-Saxons  had  been  in  cultural 
and  literary  contact  mainly  with  the  northern  part  of 
Europe.  The  intimate  contact  with  the  Scandinavian 
nations  is  reflected  in  the  subject-matter  of  Beowulf,  in 
the  strophic  form  of  several  English  poems,  in  the  form 
23 


24  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  content  of  the  Runic  Poem.  The  political  contact 
culminated  in  the  long  reign  of  Cnut,  the  Danish  king 
who  had  transferred  his  court  to  England.  From  the 
moment  Duke  William  overcame  King  Harold,  however, 
English  civilization,  the  government,  and  the  church  were 
brought  completely  into  the  southern  continental  system. 
The  Normans  not  only  brought  the  terror  of  the  sword 
and  the  strong  hand  of  conquest;  more  important  still, 
they  became  the  transmitters  to  England  of  French  cul- 
ture and  literature. 

No  one  among  the  conquered  people  of  England,  how- 
ever, could  then  have  foreseen  that  the  invasion  was  to 
prove  a  national  blessing;  for  the  sternness 
Effects  of  the    ancj  energy  with  which  the  Norman  king  and 

Norman  ,  ,  6-r 

Conquest.         his  nobles  set  about  organizing  the  law,  the 
civil  government,  and  the  church  in  the  island 
brought  with  it  much  oppression.     Over  the  length  and 
breadth  of  England  rose  those  strong  castles  whose  gray 
and  massive  walls  still  frown  over  the  pleasant  English 
landscape.     Less  forbidding  than  these,  but  at  first  no 
less  suggestive  of  the  foreigner,   splendid  stone  abbeys 
and  minsters  gradually  took  the  place  of  gloomy  little 
wooden  churches.     Forest  laws  of  terrible  harshness  pre- 
served the  "tall  deer"  which  the  king  " loved  as  his  life." 
Within  a  half-century  the  Anglo-Saxon  nobility  and 
landed  gentry  had  been  completely  displaced  by  Nor- 
mans,  while   the   English   church   had   been 
Noflnan  filled  with  French  monks  and  priests,  so  that 

Literature.  all  those  classes  which  produced  or  read 
either  polite  or  learned  literature  were  Nor- 
man-French. Furthermore,  the  constant  and  intimate 
contact  of  the  Anglo-Norman  nobility  with  France  during 
the  following  two  hundred  years  made  them  the  medium 
through  which  England  was  thoroughly  familiarized  with 
French  literary  material  and  literary  forms.  The  Anglo- 
Saxon  population,  which  placidly  continued  to  employ 


THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  2^ 

only  the  English  language,  comprised  only  that  part  of 
the  population  which  counted  scarcely  at  all  in  literature 
and  learning.  In  the  court  and  camp  and  castle,  in  the 
school,  in  Parliament,  and  on  the  justice  bench,  French 
alone  was  spoken;  while  in  the  monastery  and  in  the 
church,  reading,  writing,  and  even  conversation  were  all 
carried  on  in  Latin.  It  is  small  wonder  that  we  find  so 
little  English  prose  or  poetry  recorded  before  the  year 
1300.  The  literature  which  was  in  demand,  and  which 
consequently  came  to  constitute  the  entire  repertory  of 
the  minstrels — who  had  completely  displaced  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  scop  and  gleeman — was  exclusively  in  the  French 
language,  much  of  it  composed  by  Normans  and  French- 
men in  England,  much  of  it  produced  on  the  continent 
and  brought  across  the  channel  by  wandering  minstrels. 
These  works  in  Anglo-French  fall  into  two  divisions: 
narrative  and  didactic.  The  former  includes  epics,  ro- 
mances, and  tales;  the  latter  history,  saints'  lives  and 
miracles,  and  a  number  of  works  which  may  be  called 
utilitarian.  Besides  these,  there  are  also  preserved  nu- 
merous lyrical  and  satirical  poems,  and  some  plays.  The 
variety  of  works  in  Latin  is  wide.  In  the  field  of  pure 
literature  are  satires  and  drinking-songs,  love-songs, 
church  hymns,  and  miracle  and  scriptural  plays.  In  the 
field  of  utilitarian  writings  are  chronicles,  legends,  and 
miracles  of  saints,  works  on  philosophy,  logic,  and  the- 
ology, numerous  sermons,  and  treatises  on  the  natural 
sciences — astrology,  mathematics,  medicine,  and  law. 
Taken  as  a  whole,  the  literature  composed  or  circulated 
in  England  during  the  two  and  a  half  centuries  after  the 
battle  of  Hastings  was  rich,  varied,  and  extensive;  but 
unfortunately  very  little  of  it  was  in  the  English  language. 
If  a  prophet  had  arisen  to  tell  the  Norman  barons  and 
the  great  bishops  and  abbots  of  the  twelfth  and  thir- 
teenth centuries  that  neither  French  nor  Latin,  but 
English,  was  destined  to  be  the  standard  speech  of  their 


20  A  HISTORY   OF    ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

descendants  within  one  or  two  hundred  years,  he  would 
undoubtedly  have  been  laughed  at.  Nevertheless,  incred- 
ible as  it  would  have  seemed,  this  is  precisely 
Changes  in  what  happened.  Although  not  employed 
Speech.  in  written  documents,  the  English  tongue 

still  was  universally  spoken  by  the  lower 
classes,  and  even  by  the  young  children  of  the  nobility, 
for  we  hear  that  the  latter  had  to  be  taught  their  French 
in  their  childhood.  About  1200  English  again  began  to 
appear  in  a  few  books,  disputing  a  place  by  the  side  of 
the  elegant  language  of  the  conquerors.  Its  reappear- 
ance, however,  reveals  it  to  be  a  greatly  changed  lan- 
guage. Even  before  the  coming  of  the  Normans  the 
standard,  conservative,  literary  language  of  the  Anglo 
Saxons  had  shown  a  tendency  to  simplify  or  discard  the 
highly  complicated  Germanic  inflectional  endings.  But" 
the  complete  destruction  of  the  English-using  culture, 
and  the  relegation  of  English  speech  to  illiterate  peasants 
and  serfs,  removed  every  conservative  influence,  and 
changes  followed  in  a  rapid  flood.  The  article  "the," 
for  example,  had  its  nineteen  forms  reduced  to  one, 
From  nine  quite  different  noun  declensions,  each  with 
seven  or  eight  forms,  the  number  shrank  to  one,  with 
three  forms.  Grammatical  gender  disappeared.  Verb 
inflection  also  was  greatly  simplified.  The  number  of 
conjugations  was  lessened,  strong  ("irregular")  verbs  be- 
came weak  ("regular"),  personal  endings  became  fewer. 
Prepositions,  instead  of  taking  either  the  genitive,  dative, 
or  accusative,  took  only  the  accusative  case. 

By  1300,  when  English  again  assumed  the  position  of 
the  speech  of  culture,  its  grammar  was  still  further  sim- 
The  Result  Pu'ned,  its  inflectional  endings  were  more  nearly 
lost  altogether.  Furthermore,  the  vocabu- 
lary was  immensely  enriched  by  the  "naturalization"  of 
thousands  of  French  words.  These  are  very  largely  words 
naming  peculiarly  French  ideas,  or  at  least  ideas,  objects, 


THE    NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  27 

and  institutions  which  were  restricted  principally  to 
those  social  classes  which  had  for  two  centuries  spoken, 
read,  and  written  only  French.  Very  early  we  find  in 
English  documents  such  words  as  castle,  court,  crown, 
tower,  dungeon,  justice,  prison,  sot  ("fool"),  peace,  rent, 
charity,  privilege — almost  every  one  of  which  reveals  the 
comparative  social  positions  of  the  French  and  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking classes.  In  spite  of  the  subsequent  loss  of 
many  words,  in  spite  of  many  strange  spellings  and 
forms,  the  English  of  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  cen- 
turies is  easily  recognized  as  the  same  language  which 
we  speak  to-day,  the  medium  in  which  appeared  the 
artistic  and  cultivated  literary  work  of  Chaucer,  of  Shake- 
speare, of  Thackeray. 

Mediaeval  literature  was  disseminated  in  two  ways. 
The  first  and  more  permanent  method  was  through  copy- 
ing by  scribes.  In  every  monastery  one  part 
of  the  cloister,  or  one  room,  was  dedicated  to 
the  labor  of  these  copyists.  In  this  scrip- 
torium, on  wooden  shelves,  were  kept  the  manuscript 
books  of  the  monastery.  The  most  skilful  and  compe- 
tent members  of  the  community  spent  hours  of  daily 
labor  in  the  pleasing  task  of  copying  these  written  books. 
Working  with  quill  pen  on  sheets  of  sheepskin  or  calf- 
skin, the  scribe  copied  slowly  and  carefully,  word  by 
word  and  line  by  line,  the  page  before  him.  The  repro- 
duction of  literature,  or  of  didactic  or  religious  works, 
after  this  fashion  was  a  slow  and  very  costly  process. 
The  expensiveness  of  these  manuscript  books  was  often 
increased  because  of  the  insertion  of  elaborate  and  beau- 
tiful drawings  or  illuminations.  Naturally  such  books 
could  be  owned  only  by  the  wealthy.  Sometimes  a  sin- 
gle manuscript  would  constitute  the  whole  library  of  a 
castle.  It  would  contain  not  only  sermons,  saints'  lives, 
medical  recipes,  and  a  treatise  on  the  seven  deadly  sins, 
but  also  songs,  lyrics,  hymns,  and  usually  a  large  number 


28  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  metrical  romances,  the  most  popular  form  of  literature 
in  the  Middle  Ages. 

The  metrical  romances,  however,  were  circulated 
chiefly  by  the  minstrels.  These  picturesque  travelling 
entertainers  were  among  the  most  popular 
Minstrels.  persons  in  the  Middle  Ages.  They  journeyed 
from  country  to  country,  from  city  to  city. 
The  minstrels  of  lower  degree  entertained  villagers,  rus- 
tics, and  townspeople  with  juggling  tricks,  dances,  and 
songs,  or  by  the  recitation  of  long  narratives  of  knightly 
or  miraculous  adventure.  At  the  other  end  of  the  scale 
minstrels  of  great  skill  were  attached  to  the  courts  of 
bishops,  nobles,  and  even  kings.  Minstrels  often  organ- 
ized their  own  guilds.  The  most  skilful  had  a  large 
repertory,  constantly  increased  by  new  stories  learned 
from  their  fellows.  They  themselves  seem  never  to  have 
recorded  their  tales,  but  most  of  the  romances  which  we 
know  they  sang  were  written  in  manuscripts,  either  by 
monks  or  by  other  trained  scribes  who  made  a  business 
of  producing  and  selling  books. 

The  metrical  romances  which  composed  the  bulk  of 
the  minstrel  repertory  had  flourished  as  a  literary  type 
in  France  (and  in  the  French  language  in 
England)  for  two  centuries  before  they  began 
to  appear  in  their  English  dress.  These  fas- 
cinating poetic  tales — which  remind  us  strongly  of  some 
of  the  narrative  poems  of  Scott — were  mostly  accounts 
of  the  heroic  or  marvellous  adventures  of  those  mediaeval 
heroes — the  outstanding  figures  in  the  world  of  chivalry 
and  romance — the  warlike  and  courtly  knights  who  loved 
"trouthe  and  honour,  fredom  and  courtesye."  The  sub- 
ject was  most  often  the  adventures  of  the  knight  against 
robbers,  giants,  or  Saracens,  or  against  the  buffets  of 
poverty,  adverse  love,  or  other  misfortune.  Upon  a 
background  of  feasts  and  wars  and  tournaments,  of  rich 
armor,  gay  dress,  and  horses,  hawks,  and  hounds,  these 


THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  29 

romances  told  of  the  thrilling,  the  extravagant,  the  super- 
natural. Above  all,  they  emphasized  the  sentiment  of 
woman-worship,  which,  originating  in  the  intensely  de- 
votional cult  of  the  Virgin  Mary,  had  been  secularized 
by  the  troubadours  of  Provence,  and  had  become  a  vital 
part  of  the  great  creed  of  feudal  chivalry. 

The  material  of  these  richly  bedecked  tales  came  from 
three  principal  sources — the  matter  of  Britain,  the  mat- 
ter of  France,  an'd  the  matter  of  "Rome." 
From  Britain  came  the  tales  of  King  Arthur  JJ^erial 
and  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table;  from  Romances. 
France  the  tales  of  Charlemagne  and  his 
twelve  peers;  from  "Rome"  came  the  tales  of  classical 
times  and  of  more  mysterious  places — the  story  of  Troy, 
the  conquests  of  Alexander,  and  the  marvels  of  the 
Orient.  Of  all  these  storehouses,  the  richest  by  far  was 
the  matter  of  Britain — Wales  and  Brittany — where  for 
generations,  perhaps  for  centuries,  there  had  been  grow- 
ing up  a  mass  of  legend  connected  with  King  Arthur. 
A  number  of  these  Arthurian  legends  were  gathered  up, 
before  4:he  middle  of  the  twelfth  century,  in  a  great  Latin 
work  called  the  Historia  Regum  Britannia,  by  Geoffrey  of 
Monmouth,  a  Welsh  writer  who,  though  pretending  to 
write  a  sober  narrative  of  historical  fact,  was  roundly  de- 
nounced by  many  of  his  own  contemporaries  for  filling  his 
chronicle  with  the  products  of  his  own  imagination.  The 
book  was  immediately  translated  into  French  verse  by 
Wace,  of  Jersey,  and  through  this  channel  came,  about  the 
year  1200,  into  the  hands  of  Lawman,1  the  first  writer 
who  treated  this  material  in  the  English  tongue. 

All  that  we  know  of  Lawman,  and  of  how  he  came  to 


though  his  name  has  been  erroneously  spelled  and  pronounced  for 
seventy  years  as  "Layamon,"  its  correct  form  is  "Lawman."  The  name 
harks  back  to  the  period  of  dim  antiquity  when  every  little  community  had 
one  member  whose  duty  it  was  to  act  as  a  repository  and  interpreter  of. 
customary  law  in  case  of  village  disputes. 


30  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

write  his  Brut,  he  tells  himself  in  the  quaint  and  touch- 
ing words  with  which  the  metrical  history  opens: 

"There  was  a  priest  in  the  land  was  named  Lawman; 
he  was  the  son  of  Leovenath — may  God  be  gracious  to 
him !  He  dwelt  at  Ernley,  at  a  noble  church 
Layanioii.0r  upon  Severn  bank.  ...  It  came  to  him  in 
mind  and  in  his  chief  thought  that  he  would 
tell  the  noble  deeds  of  the  English;  what  the  men  were 
named,  and  whence  they  came,  who  first  had  the  English 
land  after  the  flood.  .  .  .  Lawman  began  to  journey 
wide  over  this  land,  and  procured  the  noble  books  which 
he  took  for  authority.  He  took  the  English  book  that 
Saint  Bede  made;1  another  he  took  in  Latin,  that  Sain": 
Albin  made  and  the  fair  Austin  .  .  . ; 2  the  third  book  he 
took  .  .  .  that  a  French  clerk  made,  named  Wace.  .  .  . 
Lawman  laid  these  books  before  him  and  turned  over  the* 
leaves;  lovingly  he  beheld  them — may  the  Lord  be  mer 
ciful  to  him!  Pen  he  took  with  fingers,  and  wrote  on 
book-skin,  and  compressed  the  three  books  into  one." 

The  poem  opens  with  an  account  of  how  "Eneas  the 
duke,"  after  the  destruction  of  Troy,  flees  into  Italy, 
and  builds  him  a  "great  burg."  After  mam^ 
years  his  great-grandson,  Brutus,  sets  out 
with  all  his  people  to  find  a  new  land  in  the 
west.  They  pass  the  Pillars  of  Hercules,  "tall  posts  oJ 
strong  marble  stone,"  where  they  find  the  mermaidens, 
"  beasts  of  great  deceit,  and  so  sweet  that  many  men  are 
not  able  to  quit  them."  After  further  adventures  in 
Spain  and  France,  they  come  at  length  to  the  shores  of 
England,  and  land  "at  Dartmouth  in  Totnes."  The 
verse  has  now  run  on  for  two  thousand  lines,  and  the 
story*  itself  has  just  begun.  But  leisurely  as  Lawman  is, 
he  is  seldom  tedious;  the  story  lures  one  on  from  page  to 
page,  until  one  forgets  the  enormous  length.  In  treat- 

1  The  Anglo-Saxon  version  of  Bede's  Ecclesiastical  History. 
-  Probably  the  original  Latin  version  of  Bede,  the  authorship  being  mis- 
taken by  Lawman. 


t       THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  31 

ing  the  Arthur  legends,  Lawman  is  not  content  merely 
to  transcribe  his  predecessors.  His  own  home  was  near 
the  borders  of  Wales,  where  these  legends  were  native; 
and  he  either  first  recorded  or  invented  several  additions 
of  the  utmost  importance.  The  most  notable  of  these 
are  his  story  of  the  founding  of  the  Round  Table,  and 
his  account  of  the  fays  who  are  present  at  Arthur's  birth 
and  who  carry  him  after  his  last  battle  to  the  mystic  isle 
of  Avalon. 

The  publication,  within  a  few  years,  in  three  languages, 
of  a  fascinating  body  of  material  so  available  for  literary 
treatment  could  not  be  overlooked  by  poets 
and  minstrels.  Within  a  few  decades  Arthur  Romances 
and  his  train  of  great  knights,  Gawain,  Lance- 
lot, Percival,  Tristram,  and  many  others  had  kindled  the 
imagination  of  writers  and  audiences,  and  appeared  as 
the  leading  figures  in  scores  of  courtly  or  popular  ro- 
mances in  England,  France,  and  Germany.  Arthur  be- 
came the  incarnation  of  chivalry.  Most  of  the  romances 
received  their  first  literary  treatment  in  France,  the  cen- 
tre of  mediaeval  internationalism  in  culture  and  literature. 
Almost  all  the  English  romances  of  the  thirteenth  and 
fourteenth  centuries  are  free  renderings  from  French 
originals.  This  is  true  not  only  of  those  which  deal  with 
continental  heroes,  like  Charlemagne  and  Alexander,  or 
which  tell  a  tale  of  continental  origin,  like  Amis  and 
Amiloun  (a  tale  of  sworn  brothers-in-arms)  and  Floris 
and  Blancheflour  (a  romantic  love-story) ;  but  also  of  the 
Arthur  stories,  whose  source  was  British,  and  even  of 
the  stories  of  purely  English  heroes,  Bevis  of  Hampton, 
and  Guy  of  Warwick.  But  of  all  the  Arthurian  romances 
in  English  of  this  .period,  such  as  Sir  Tristram,  Arthour 
and  Merlin,  Morte  d'Arthure,  and  The  Awentyres  (adven- 
tures) of  Arthur  at  the  Tarn  Watheling  (Tarn  Wadling  in 
Cumberland),  there  is  one,  the  best  of  all,  and  one  of 
the  most  charming  romances  of  the  world.  This  is  Sir 
Gawayne  and  the  Green  Knight.  Its  date  is  perhaps  as 


32         A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATUK$ 

late  as  1380,  but  it  is  the  culmination  of  the  whole  school 
of  the  preceding  two  centuries,  and  therefore  is  legiti- 
mately to  be  regarded  as  "Norman- French." 

When  the  poem  opens,  King  Arthur  and  his  court  are 
gathered  in  the  hall  at  Camelot  to  celebrate  the  feast  of 
the  New  Year.  The  king,  "so  busied  him  his 
Gawayne  and  young  blood  and  his  wild  brain,"  will  not  eat 
the  Green  until  some  adventure  has  befallen.  As  the 
first  course  comes  in,  "with  cracking  of 
trumpets,"  and  the  "noise  of  nakers  (drums),  with  noble 
pipes,"  there  suddenly  rushes  in  at  the  hall  door  a  gigan- 
tic knight,  clothed  entirely  in  green,  mounted  on  a  green 
foal,  and  bearing  in  one  hand  a  holly  bough,  in  the  other 
a  great  axe.  He  rides  to  the  dais,  and  challenges  any 
knight  to  give  him  a  blow  with  his  axe,  and  to  abide  one 
in  turn.  Gawayne,  the  king's  nephew,  smites  off  the 
head  of  the  Green  Knight,  who  quietly  picks  it  up  by 
the  hair,  and  holds  it  out  toward  Gawayne,  until  the  lips 
speak,  giving  him  rendezvous  at  the  Green  Chapel  on 
the  next  New  Year's  Day. 

On  All-Hallow's  Day  Gawayne  sets  out  upon  his  horse 
Gringolet,  and  journeys  through  North  Wales,  past  Holy- 
head  into  the  wilderness  of  Wirral;  "sometimes  with 
worms  (serpents)  he  wars,  with  wolves  and  bears,"  with 
giants  and  wood-satyrs,  until  at  last  on  Christmas  Eve 
he  comes  to  a  great  forest  of  hoar  oaks.  He  calls  upon 
Mary,  "mildest  mother  so  dear,"  to  help  him.  Immedi- 
ately he  sees  a  fair  castle  standing  on  a  hill;  and  asking 
shelter  he  is  courteously  received  by  the  lord  of  the 
castle,  his  fair  young  wife,  and  an  ugly  ancient  dame. 

After  the  Christmas  festivities  are  over,  Gawayne  at- 
tempts to  set  forth  again  on  his  quest,  but  is  assured  that 
the  Green  Chapel  is  so  near  he  may  safely  remain  till  the 
day  of  his  appointment.  His  host  now  prepares  for  a 
great  hunt,  to  last  three  days,  and  a  jesting  compact  is 
made  between  them  that  at  the  end  of  each  day  they 
shall  give  each  other  whatever  good  thing  they  have 


THE    NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  33 

won.  While  her  lord  is  absent  on  the  hunt  the  lady  of 
the  castle  tries  in  vain  to  induce  Gawayne  to  make  love 
to  her,  and  bestows  upon  him  a  kiss.  Anxious  to  fulfil 
his  compact,  he  in  turn  gives  the  kiss  to  her  lord  each 
night  when  the  hunt  is  over,  and  receives  as  a  counter- 
gift  the  spoils  of  the  chase.  At  their  last  meeting  the 
lady  persuades  Gawayne  to  take  as  a  gift  a  green  belt 
which  will  protect  him  from  mortal  harm.  Thinking  it 
"a  jewel  for  the  jeopardy"  that  he  is  to  run  at  the  Green 
Chapel,  he  keeps  the  gift  a  secret,  and  thus  proves  false 
to  his  compact. 

On  New  Year's  morning  he  sets  out  with  a  guide 
through  a  storm  of  snow,  past  forests  and  cliffs,  where 
"each  hill  has  a  hat  and  a  mist-cloak,"  to  find  the  Green 
Chapel.  It  proves  to  be  a  grass-covered  hollow  mound, 
in  a  desert  valley,  "  the  most  cursed  kirk,"  says  Gawayne, 
"that  ever  I  came  in."  The  Green  Knight  appears,  and 
deals  a  blow  with  his  axe  upon  Gawayne's  bent  neck. 
But  he  only  pierces  the  skin,  and  Gawayne,  seeing  the 
blood  fall  on  the  snow,  claps  on  his  helmet,  draws  his 
sword,  and  declares  the  compact  fulfilled.  The  Green 
Knight  then  discloses  the  fact  that  he  himself  is  the  lord 
of  the  castle  where  Gawayne  has  just  been  entertained, 
that  the  ugly  ancient  dajne  who  dwells  with  him  is  the 
fairy-woman,  Morgain  la  Fay,  who,  because  of  her  hatred 
of  Guinevere,  had  sent  him  to  frighten  her  at  the  New 
Year's  feast  with  the  sight  of  a  severed  head  talking,  and 
who  has  been  trying  to  leati  Gawayne  into  bad  faith  and 
untruthfulness,  in  order  that  she  may  grieve  Guinevere, 
Arthur's  queen.  By  his  loyalty  to  his  host  Gawayne 
has  been  saved,  except  for  the  slight  wound  as  punish- 
ment for  concealing  the  gift  of  the  girdle.  Gawayne 
swears  to  wear  the  "love-lace"  in  remembrance  of  his 
weakness;  and  ever  afterward  each  knight  of  the  Round 
Table,  and  every  lady  of  Arthur's  court,  wears  a  bright 
green  belt  for  Gawayne's  sake. 

The  picturesque  and  nervous  language  of  the  poem,  its 


34  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

bright  humor  and  fancy,  its  characterizations,  the  vivid 
beauty  of  its  descriptions,  as  well  as  the  skilful  structure, 
and  especially  the  pictures  of  English  castle  life  in  the 
Christmas  holidays,  and  the  detailed  and  lively  accounts 
of  the  hunting  of  the  boar,  the  fox,  and  the  deer,  all 
contribute  to  make  this  the  most  delightful  blossom  of 
English  romance. 

While  the  shimmering  tapestry  and  cloth  of  gold  of 
these  bright  romances  was  being  woven  to  beguile  the 
tedium  of  castle  halls,  a  more  sober  literary 
fabric  grew  under  the  patient  hands  of  monks 
and  religious  enthusiasts.  The  Cursor  Mundi, 
the  author  of  which  is  unknown,  deserves  particular  com- 
ment. Though  religious  in  aim  and  in  matter,  it  showsi 
a  wholesome  secular  desire  to  be  entertaining.  The 
author,  in  beginning,  laments  the  absorption  of  the  read 
ers  of  his  day  in  frivolous  romance,  and  proposes  to  com- 
pete against  these  vain  tales  of  earthly  love  with  a  tale 
of  divine  love  which  shall  be  equally  thrilling.  He  then 
proceeds  to  tell  in  flowing  verse  the  story  of  God's  deal 
ings  with  man,  from  the  creation  to  the  final  redemption, 
following  in  general  the  biblical  narrative,  but  adorning 
it  with  popular  legends,  both  sacred  and  secular,  and 
with  all  manner  of  quaint  digressions.  The  ambition  of 
the  author  has  really  been  accomplished;  his  book  is 
indeed  a  "religious  romance,"  and  may  well  have  been  a 
respectable  rival  of  its  more  worldly  brothers,  in  catching 
the  ear  of  such  readers  as  Were  willing  to  be  edified  at 
the  same  time  that  they  were  entertained. 

Of  another  religious  writer  whose  work  rises  to  the 

dignity  of  literature,   the  name  and  story  have  fortu 

nately    been    preserved.     This    is    Richard! 

Roiteaf  Rolle,   the  hermit  of  Hampole,  in  southern 

Hampoie.         Yorkshire,  who  was  born  about  1300  and  died: 

in  1349.     In  his  youth  he  went  to  Oxford. 

then  at  the  height  of  its  fame  as  a  centre  of  scholastic 

learning;   but   the   mysticism   and   erratic   ardor   of   his 


THE    NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  35 

nature  made  him  soon  revolt  against  the  dry  intellectual- 
ity of  the  scholastic  teaching.  He  left  college,  made  a 
hermit's  shroud  out  of  two  of  his  sister's  gowns  and  his 
father's  hood,  and  began  the  life  of  a  religious  solitary 
and  mystic.  His  cell  at  Hampole,  near  a  Cistercian 
nunnery,  was  after  his  death  visited  as  a  miracle-working 
shrine,  and  cared  for  by  the  nuns.  He  wrote  numerous 
canticles  of  divine  love,  many  of  which,  though  in  prose, 
are  intense  devotional  lyrics. 

But  of  all  the  religious  writings  of  this  period,  by  far 
the  most  beautiful  are  three  poems,  one  lyric,  one  narra- 
tive,  the   third   theological,  which   approach  t 
the  subject  of  divine  love,  or  wrath,  from  the      Rune  "  of 
personal  side,  and  treat  it  with  personal  in-       Thomas  de 
timacy.     The  first  is  the  famous  "Love  Rune" 
of  Thomas  de  Hales,  a  monk  of  the  Minor  Friars.     He 
tells  us  in  the  first  stanza  that  he  was  besought  by  a 
maid  of  Christ  to  make  her  a  love-song,  in  order  that 
she  might  learn  therefrom  how  to  choose  a  worthy  and 
faithful  lover.     The  monkish  poet  consents,  but  goes  on 
to  tell  her  how  false  and  fleeting  is  all  worldly  love;  how 
all  earthly  lovers  vanish  and  are  forgotten. 

Hwer  is  Paris  and  Heleyne 

That  weren  so  bryght  and  feyre  on  ble? 

Amadas,  Tristram,  and  Dideyne, 

Yseude,  and  alle  the? 

Ector,  with  his  scharpe  meyne, 

And  Cesar  riche  of  worldes  fee? 

Heo  beoth  iglyden  ut  of  the  reyne, 

So  the  scheft  is  of  the  clee. 

[Where  is  Paris  and  Helen,  that  were  so  bright  and  fair  of  face? 
Amadas,  Tristram,  Dido,  Iseult,  and  all  those?  Hector  with  his 
sharp  strength,  and  Caesar  rich  with  the  world's  fee  (wealth)  ? 
They  be  glided  out  of  the  realm,  as  the  shaft  is  from  the  clew  (bow- 
string).] 

"But  there  is  another  lover,"  the  poet  continues,  who 
is  "richer  than  Henry  our  King,  and  whose  dwelling  is 


36         A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fairer  than  Solomon's  house  of  jasper  and  sapphire. 
Choose  Him,  and  may  God  bring  thee  to  His  bride- 
chamber  in  Heaven."  The  poem  is  well-nigh  perfect  in 
form,  and  for  rich  and  tender  melody  bears  comparison 
with  the  best  lyrical  work  of  Shakespeare's  age.  It 
gleams  like  a  jewel  even  among  the  great  mass  of  skilled 
sacred — and  secular — song  of  the  time. 

The  second  religious  poem  which  deserves  to  be  classed 
with  this  by  reason  of  its  beauty  and  its  emotional  appeal, 

"  The  Pearl "  *s  mucn  l°nger>  an<^  written  in  stanzas  with  a 
complicated  rhyme-scheme.  It  is  called  The 
Pearl.  The  grief-stricken  poet  falls  asleep  on  the  grave 
of  a  young  girl,  "nearer  to  him  than  aunt  or  niece"; 
whom  he  symbolizes  as  his  "Pearl."  In  a  vision  he  sees 
her,  and  beholds  the  celestial  country  where  she  dwells. 
He  dreams  that  he  is  transported  to  a  wonderful  land, 
through  which  a  musical  river  flows  over  pearly  sand, 
and  stones  that  glitter  like  stars  on  a  winter  night. 
Around  him  are  "crystal  cliffs  so  clear  of  kind,"  forests 
that  gleam  like  silver  and  ring  with  the  melody  of  bright- 
hued  birds.  On  the  other  side  of  the  river,  at  the  foot  of 
a  gleaming  cliff,  he  sees  a  maid  sitting,  clothed  in  bright 
raiment  trimmed  with  pearls,  and  in  the  midst  of  her 
breast  a  great  pearl.  She  rises  and  conies  toward  him. 
Then  the  mourner  tries  to  cross  over,  but  being  unable, 
cries  out  to  know  if  she  is  indeed  his  pearl,  since  the  loss 
of  which  he  has  been  "a  joyless  jeweller."  The  maiden 
tells  him  that  his  pearl  is  not  really  lost,  gently  reproves 
the  impatience  of  his  grief,  and  expounds  some  of  the 
mysteries  of  heaven,  where  she  reigns  as  a  queen  with 
Mary.  The  mourner  begs  to  be  taken  to  her  abiding- 
place;  she  tells  him  that  he  may  see,  but  cannot  enter, 
"that  clean  cloister."  She  bids  him  go  along  the  river- 
bank  until  he  comes  to  a  hill.  Arrived  at  the  top,  he 
sees  afar  off  the  celestial  city,  "pitched  upon  gems,"  with 
its  walls  of  jasper  and  streets  of  gold.  At  the  wonder  of 


THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  37' 

the  sight  he  stands,  "still  as  a  dazed  quail,"  and  gazing 
sees,  "right  as  the  mighty  moon  gan  rise,"  the  Virgins 
walking  in  procession  with  the  Lamb  of  God.  The 
maiden  is  one  of  them. 

Then  saw  I  there  my  little  queen — 
Lord !  much  of  mirth  was  that  she  made 
Among  her  mates. 

He  strives  in  transport  to  cross  over  and  be  with  her, 
but  it  is  not  pleasing  to  God  that  he  should  come,  and 
the  dreamer  awakes. 

The  third  religious  poem,  remarkable  for  its  skilful 
structure  and  finished  style,  is  the  Debate  Between  the 
Body  and  the  Soul;  the  subject  is  treated  also  „ 

IT.-  JT-          t  -  ^    ^  ^       "Debate 

in  several  Latin  and  French  versions,  but  the  Between 
English  is  markedly  the  best.  The  poet,  who  J*  ^y,tnd 
has  fallen  into  a  deep  slumber,  sees  lying  on 
a  bier  the  body  of  a  proud  knight,  from  which  issues  a 
dim  shape,  the  soul,  lamenting  and  bitterly  reproaching 
the  body  for  its  pride,  gluttony,  and  envy,  which  have 
sentenced  the  soul  to  eternal  damnation.  The  body  an- 
swers that  the  blame  belongs  to  the  soul,  who  has  al- 
ways been  the  master,  and  a  debate  ensues  concerning 
the  responsibility  for  the  wretched  plight  of  both. 
Finally  a  host  of  devils  appear  from  hell: 

Thei  weren  ragged,  rove,  and  tayled, 
With  brode  bulches  on  here  bac, 
Scharpe  clauwes,  longe  nayled; 
No  was  no  lime  withoute  lac. 
On  alle  halve  it  was  asayled 
With  mani  a  devel,  foul  and  blac; 
Merci  crying  litel  availede, 
Hwan  Crist  it  wolde  so  harde  wrac. 

[They  were  ragged,  rough,  and  tailed,  with  broad  bulges  on  their 
back,  sharp  claws,  long  nailed;  no  limb  was  without  deformity. 
On  every  side  it  was  assailed  with  many  a  devil  foul  and  black; 
crying  "mercy"  little  availed,  when  Christ  wished  it  such  hard 
vengeance.] 


38  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

With  horse  and  hounds  the  devils  pursued  him  into  a 
sulphurous  pit;  the  earth  locked  itself  again;  and  the 
dreamer  awoke,  cold  with  fear.  The  poem  is  notable  for 
its  vividness,  as  well  as  its  phrasal  and  haunting  lyric 
power. 

The  amalgamation  of  the  English  and  French  peoples 
and  their  cultures  produced  important  results  in  the 
metre  as  well  as  in  the  vocabulary  and  liter- 
ary  content  of  the  new  language.  Anglo- 
French  Saxon  poetry  had  depended  for  its  rhythmical 
effect  upon  two  devices,  alliteration  and 
accent.  The  number  of  syllables  in  any 
given  line  could  vary  greatly,  and  the  accents  could  fall 
anywhere  in  the  line.  The  result  was  that  the  rhythm 
of  Anglo-Saxon  verse  was  exceedingly  loose  and  pliable. 
Anglo-French  verse  depended  upon  two  devices  quite 
different  from  these — rhyme,  and  a  fixed  number  of  syl- 
lables; the  metrical  system  was  therefore  very  definite 
and  exact.  When  the  fusion  came  there  was  a  struggle 
as  to  which  system  should  prevail  in  the  new  language. 
Some  of  the  English  poets,  even  as  late  as  the  authors  of 
Piers  the  Plowman,  stood  out  for  the  old  system  of  accent 
and  alliteration,  without  rhyme  and  without  a  fixed 
number  of  syllables;  others  imitated  slavishly  the  French' 
system  of  rhyme  and  uniform  line-length;  others,  like' 
the  author  of  Sir  Gawayne  and  the  Green  Knight,  wrote 
stanzas  in  the  looser  alliterating  metre,  with  rhyming- 
verses  at  intervals.  Still  others  wrote  in  the  alliterating 
measure,  but  adopted  more  or  less  elaborate  rhyme- 
schemes.  The  final  outcome  of  the  struggle,  however, 
was  that  English  verse  gave  up  regular  alliteration,  re- 
taining it  only  as  an  occasional  decoration.  The  princi- 
ple of  accent,  however,  was  retained;  but,  under  the  in- 
fluence of  the  French  prosody,  a  system  dependent  on 
a  fixed  and  regular  number  of  syllables,  with  almost  ab- 
solute alternation  between  accented  and  unaccented  syl- 


THE   NORMAN-FRENCH   PERIOD  39 

lables,  was  adopted.  Here  again,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
vocabulary,  the  merging  of  Anglo-Saxon  and  French  had 
a  most  happy  result.  It  is  by  reason  of  this  merging 
that  English  is  capable  of  more  subtle  and  varied  lyrical 
effects  than  almost  any  other  modern  language. 

Nor  did  the  poets  fail  to  show,  even  as  early  as  the 
thirteenth  century,  their  appreciation  of  what  an  ex- 
quisite instrument  had  fallen  into  their  hands; 
for  we  possess  several  songs  of  that  period,  Qualities 
and  a  little  later,  which  have  in  them  more 
than  a  promise  of  Herri ck  and  Shelley.  They  are  mostly 
SiOngs  of  love  and  of  spring.  The  best  known  is  per- 
haps the  Cuckoo  Song,  with  its  refrain  of  "Loude  sing 
Cuckoo!";  but  even  more  charming  are  the  spring-song 
"Lent  is  come  with  love  to  town,"  and  the  love-song 
called  Allisoun,  with  its  delightful  opening: 

Bitwene  Mersh  and  Averil 
When  spray1  begineth  to  springe. 
The  little  fowles2  have  hyre3  will 
On  hyre  lud4  to  singe. 

The  England  which  finds  utterance  in  these  songs  is 
n  very  different  England  from  that  which  had   spoken 
m  The  Wanderer,  and  The  Seafarer.     It  is  no 
longer   onlv   the   fierce   and   gloomy   aspects      Result  of 

/•  i  11          1-1  ill-  *"e  -Norman 

of  nature,  but  also  her  bright  and  laughing  Conquest 
moods,  that  are  sung.  The  imaginations  of 
men  work  now  not  only  in  terms  of  war  but  also  of  peace. 
England  is  no  longer  isolated;  its  culture  is  continental, 
international.  Its  intellectual  and  emotional  Hfe  is  rich 
and  variegated.  The  Norman  invasion  has  done  its 
work.  The  conquerors  have  ceased  to  be  such,  have 
ceased  also  to  be  a  class  apart,  for  foreign  wars  and  cen- 
turies of  domestic  intercourse  have  broken  down  the 
(distinction  between  men  of  Norman  and  men  of  Anglo- 
1  Foliage.  2  Birds.  3  Their.  * Voice. 


4O  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Saxon  blood.  The  new  language  is  formed,  a  new  and 
vigorous  national  life  is  everywhere  manifest.  The  time 
is  ripe  for  a  new  poet,  great  enough  to  gather  up  and 
make  intelligible  to  itself  this  shifting,  many-colored  life; 
and  Chaucer  is  at  hand. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE   AGE    OF    CHAUCER 


GEOFFREY  CHAUCER  was  born  about  1340.  His  father, 
one  of  the  Corporation  of  Vintners,  was  at  one  time  a  pur- 
veyor to  King  Edward  III.  It  was  probably 
through  this  business  connection  with  the 
court  that  Chaucer,  when  about  seventeen, 
became  a  page  in  the  household  of  the  King's  daughter- 
in-law,  the  Duchess  of  Clarence.  Two  years  later  he 
went  with  the  King's  army  to  France,  where  he  saw 
unrolled  the  brilliant  pageant  of  mediaeval  war,  as  the 
French  chronicler  Froissart  has  pictured  it,  at  a  time 
when  chivalry  and  courtesy  had  flamed  into  their  great- 
est splendor.  He  beheld  the  unsuccessful  siege  of  the 
city  of  Rheims;  was  captured  by  the  French,  and  was 
held  as  a  prisoner  of  war  until  ransomed. 

On  his  return  to  England  he  became  an  Esquire  of  the 
King's  Bedchamber,  and  spent  the  next  ten  years  at 
Edward's  court,  then  one  of  the  most  brilliant 
in  Europe.     The  court  of  Edward  still  had        ^™ccher>s 
all  the  atmosphere  of  a  French  court,  and        Period. 
Chaucer,  although  he  decided  to  use  his  native 
tongue,  became  practically  a  French  love-poet  writing  in 
the  English  language.     Aside  from  the  use  of  the  eight- 
syllable  line,  rhyming  in  couplets,  the  conventions  of  the 
French  school  which  are  most  evident  in  Chaucer's  work 
are  those  which  belong  to  the  system  of  courtly  love,  and 
those  structural  principles  observable  in  the  love-visions 
which  preceded  and  were  contemporary  with  Chaucer. 
41 


42  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  conventions  of  the  system  of  courtly  love,  indeed, 
permeate  nearly  all  mediaeval  non-religious  literature. 
The  lover,  compelled  to  be  a  faithful  "servant"  of  his 
lady  and  of  Dan  Cupid,  must  languish  in  amorous  pallor, 
toss  sleepless  on  his  couch,  swoon,  boast  of  his  lady's 
beauty  and  wit,  compose  ballads  in  her  honor,  and  fight 
for  the  glorification  of  her  token.  The  lady  must  be  cold 
as  ice,  must  impose  on  her  lover  incredible  trials  of  his 
courage  and  fidelity.  After  many  years  of  hopeless  ser- 
vice the  lover  may  be  accepted,  not  because  of  any  merit 
of  himself  or  of  his  deeds,  but  purely  because  of  the 
lady's  boundless  compassion.  These  are  the  rules  of 
conduct  governing  the  actors  in  the  love-visions — poems 
in  which  the  lover,  exhausted  by  the  play  of  his  emotions, 
falls  asleep  at  dawn  to  the  music  of  birds  and  the  melody 
of  brooks,  amidst  flowers  and  perfumes,  and  dreams  of 
knights  wooing  their  ladies.  The  most  famous  work  of 
this  French  school  was  the  Roman  de  la  Rose,  an  elaborate 
allegory,  placed  in  a  dream-setting,  of  Love,  the  rose, 
growing  in  a  mystic  garden,  warded  by  symbolic  powers 
from  the  lover's  approach,  and  provoking  endless  dis- 
quisitions, serious  or  satirical,  such  as  the  later  Middle 
Ages  loved  to  spend  upon  the  subtleties  of  sentiment. 
Chaucer  manifested  his  enthusiasm  for  this  work  by 
translating  it  into  English  verse.  Less  than  two  thou- 
sand lines  of  his  translation  have  survived;  indeed,  the 
whole  may  never  have  been  completed.  But  the  Roman 
de  la  Rose  and  other  poems  of  its  school  left  a  profound 
impression  upon  Chaucer's  work,  and  for  years  he  thought 
and  wrote  in  the  atmosphere  which  they  created  for  him. 
During  these  years  of  French  influence  he  wrote,  for  the 
knights  and  ladies  of  King  Edward's  court,  those  "bal- 
lades, roundels,  virelays,"  by  which  his  fellow-poet  Gower 
says  "the  land  fulfilled  was  over  all."  The  most  impor- 
tant work  which  remains  to  us  from  his  purely  French 
period,  however,  is  the  Boke  of  the  DucJiessc.  written  in 


THE   AGE    OF   CHAUCER  43 

1369  to  solace  John  of  Gaunt,  the  King's  third  son,  for 
the  death  of  his  wife,  Blaunche.  In  this  work  Chaucer 
has  transformed  the  conventions  of  love-vision  and  of 
courtly  love  into  a  sincere  and  moving  personal  elegy. 

Between  1370  and  1385  Chaucer  made  several  journeys 
on  official  business  to  Flanders,  to  France,  and  to  Italy. 
Although  these  journeys  are  not .  marks  of 
special  favor — many  'of  the  other  esquires  of  LatS^Life. 
the  household  made  similar  journeys,  and 
either  Chaucer's  missions  were  of  small  importance  or  he 
was  merely  a  subordinate  in  the  train  of  some  person  of 
high  degree — yet  the  opportunities  afforded  by  wide 
travel  for  converse  with  many  types  of  men,  for  observa- 
tion of  widely  varying  manners,  and  especially  for  be- 
coming familiar  with  Italian  literature,  were  of  the 
utmost  importance  in  his  poetic  education.  During  the 
remainder  of  his  life,  Chaucer — like  many  others  of  the 
King's  esquires — held  various  official  positions,  some  of 
which  were  probably  in  the  nature  of  political  sinecures, 
for  much  of  the  time  his  work  was  performed  by  depu- 
ties. For  twelve  years  he  was  controller  of  the  customs 
on  wool,  leather,  and  skins  at  the  port  of  London.  For 
a  while  he  was  simultaneously  controller  of  the  petty 
customs  at  the  same  port.  In  1386  he  represented  the 
County  of  Kent  as  "Knight  of  the  Shire."  In  1389  he 
was  appointed  clerk  of  the  King's  works  at  Westminster, 
the  Tower,  Windsor  Castle,  and  other  places.  Most  of 
the  time  during  the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life  we  find 
him  also  drawing  a  pension  from  the  national  treasury, 
as  well  as  the  money  equivalent  of  a  daily  pitcher  of  wine 
from  the  King's  cellars.  For  several  years  he  and  his 
wife  (whom  he  had  married  about  1366)  also  received 
pensions  from  John  of  Gaunt.  Chaucer  died  in  1400. 

The  one  event  in  Chaucer's  life  which  probably  pro- 
duced the  profoundest  effect  on  his  literary  career  was 
his  first  visit  to  Italy,  in  1372.  Italy  was  then  at  the 


44  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

zenith  of  her  artistic  energy,  in  the  full  splendor  of  that 
illumination  which  had  followed  the  intellectual  twilight 

of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  which  we  know  as  the 
Renaissance  Renaissance,  or  "New  Birth."  Each  of  her 

little  city-states  was  a  centre  of  marvellous 
activity,  and  everywhere  were  being  produced  those  mas- 
terpieces of  painting;  sculpture,  and  architecture  which 
still  make  Italy  a  place  of  pilgrimage  for  all  lovers  of  art. 
The  literary  activity  was  equally  great,  at  least  in  Tus- 
cany. Dante  had  been  dead  for  half  a  century,  but  his 
poetry  was  just  beginning  to  be  widely  recognized  as  one 
of  the  world-forces  in  the  realm  of  imagination.  Pe- 
trarch, the  grave,  accomplished  scholar  and  elegant  poet, 
was  passing  his  closing  years  at  his  villa  of  Arqua,  near 
Padua;  Boccaccio,  poet,  tale-writer,  pedant,  and  world- 
ling, was  spending  the  autumn  of  his  life  among  the 
cypress  and  laurel  slopes  of  Fiesole,  above  Florence.  The 
world  which  lay  open  to  Chaucer's  gaze  when  he  crossed 
the  Alps  was,  therefore,  one  calculated  to  fascinate  and 
stimulate  him  in  the  highest  degree. 

From    Chaucer's   poems    we    get    only   an    occasional 
glimpse  of  his  life.     One  of  these  reveals  his  eagerness 

for  study,  which,  after  the  day's  work  was 
Chaucer  done,  would  send  him  home,  regardless  of 

and  the  _.  ,,  *//          i         i 

Renaissance,  rest  and  "newe  thmges,  to  sit  as  domb  as 
any  stone"  over  his  book,  until  his  eyes 
were  dazed.  The  unquenchable  curiosity  of  the  men  of 
the  Renaissance  was  his,  more  than  a  century  before  the 
Renaissance  really  began  to  affect  England.  His,  too, 
was  their  thirst  for  expression.  The  great  books  he  had 
come  to  know  in  Italy  gave  him  no  peace  until  he  should 
equal  or  surpass  them.  Among  the  works  which  he  pro- 
duced, very  largely  in  emulation  of  the  Italian  masters, 
were  the  House  of  Fame,  the  Parlement  of  Foules  (Birds), 
Troilus  and  Creseide,  and  the  Legend  of  Goode  Wommen, 
the  last  of  which  was  dedicated  to  the  young  Queen, 


THE   AGE   OF   CHAUCER  45 

Anne  of  Bohemia,   whom   Richard   II   had    married  in 
1382. 

Both  the  House  of  Fame  and  the  Parlement  of  Fouks 
are  colored  with  Italian  reminiscence;  but  the  chief  fruit 
of  Chaucer's  Italian  journeys — aside  from  his 
increased  power  as  a  literary  artist,  due  to 
his  emulation  of  the  Italian  poets — was  the 
long  poem  adapted  from  Boccaccio's  Philostrato  (The 
Love-Stricken  One),  entitled  by  Chaucer  Troilus  and 
Creseide.  The  story  of  the  love  of  the  young  Trojan 
hero  for  Cressida,  and  of  her  desertion  of  him  for  the 
Greek  Diomedes,  had  been  elaborated  during  the  Middle 
Ages  until  it  finally  was  retold  by  Boccaccio,  who  gave 
it  an  animated  but  ornate  treatment  in  facile  verse. 
Chaucer,  though  pretending  only  to  translate,  radically 
changed  the  structure  and  emphasis  of  the  story.  Instead 
of  an  almost  unmotivated  recital  of  a  mere  intrigue,  Chau- 
cer has  written  a  genuine  psychological  novel,  analyzing 
minutely  the  action  and  reaction  of  character  and  situ- 
ation upon  the  leading  persons.  In  his  hands  the  lovers' 
go-between,  Pandarus,  is  transformed  from  a  gilded 
youth  of  Troilus's  own  age  and  temperament  to  a  middle- 
aged  man,  plausible,  good-natured,  full  of  easy  worldly 
wisdom  and  materialistic  ideas — a  character  as  true  to 
type  and  as  vitally  alive  as  if  Shakespeare  had  drawn 
him.  The  growth  of  the  love-passion  in  Cressida's  heart 
is  traced  through  its  gradual  stages  with  a  subtlety  en- 
tirely new  in  English  poetry.  The  action,  dialogue,  and 
"stage-setting"  of  the  poem  are  all  created  with  the 
magic  realism  of  a  master  of  narrative  art.  Though  the 
scene  is  ancient  Troy,  though  the  manners  and  customs 
are  those  of  mediaeval  knights  and  ladies,  though  the 
texture  of  the  whole  is  stiffly  brocaded  with  the  conven- 
tions of  courtly  love,  we  seem,  in  many  passages,  to  be 
looking  at  a  modern  play  or  reading  from  a  modern 
novel,  so  intimate  and  actual  does  it  appear. 


46  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  Legend  of  Goode  Wommen  is  chiefly  interesting 
because  of  its  prologue.  In  the  body  of  the  poem  Cleo- 
patra, Dido,  Thisbe,  and  other  famous  women 
"Legend  are  celebrated  for  their  steadfastness  in  love, 
Wommen."  possibly  as  a  covert  tribute  to  the  wifely  vir- 
tues of  the  young  Queen.  These  stories  are 
adapted  from  a  Latin  work  of  Boccaccio,  De  Claris 
Mulieribus.  But  the  long  prologue,  original  with  Chau- 
cer, is  the  most  winning  of  his  many  passages  of  personal 
confession  and  self-revelation. 

He  represents  himself  as  wandering  in  the  fields  on 
May-day,  the  only  season  which  can  tempt  him  from  his 
books.  The  birds  are  singing  to  their  mates  their  song 
of  "blessed  be  Seynt  Valentyn !"  and  Zephyrus  and  Flora, 
as  "god  and  goddesse  of  the  flowry  mede,"  have  spread 
the  earth  with  fragrant  blossoms.  But  the  poet  has 
eyes  only  for  one  flower,  the  daisy,  the  "emperice  (em- 
press) and  flour  of  floures  alle."  All  day  long  he  leans 
and  pores  upon  the  flower;  and  when  at  last  it  has  folded 
its  leaves  at  the  coming  of  night  he  goes  home  to  rest, 
with  the  thought  of  rising  early  to  gaze  upon  it  once 
more.  He  makes  his  couch  out  of  doors,  in  a  little  arbor, 
"for  deyntee  of  the  newe  someres  sake,"  and  here  he  has 
a  wonderful  dream.  He  dreams  that  he  is  again  in  the 
fields,  kneeling  by  the  daisy,  and  sees  approaching  a 
procession  of  bright  forms.  First  comes  the  young  god 
of  love,  clad  in  silk  embroidered  with  red  rose-leaves  and 
sprays  of  green,  his  "gilt  hair"  crowned  with  light,  in  his 
hand  two  fiery  darts,  and  his  wings  spread  angel-like. 
He  leads  by  the  hand  a  queen,  clad  in  green  and  crowned 
with  a  fillet  of  daisies  under  a  band  of  gold.  She  is 
Alcestis,  type  of  noblest  wifely  devotion.  Behind  her 
comes  an  endless  train  of  women  who  have  been  "  t'rewe 
of  love."  They  kneel  in  a  circle  about  the  poet,  and  sing 
with  one  voice  honor  to  woman's  faithfulness,  and  to  the 
daisy  flower,  the  emblem  of  Alcestis.  The  love-god  then 


THE   AGE    OF   CHAUCER  47 

glowers  angrily  upon  Chaucer,  and  upbraids  him  for 
having  done  despite  to  women,  in  translating  the  Roman 
de  la  Rose,  with  its  satire  upon  their  foibles;  and  in  writ- 
ing the  story  of  Cressida,  so  dishonorable  to  the  stead- 
fastness of  the  sex.  Alcestis  comes  to  his  rescue,  and 
agrees  to  pardon  his  misdeeds  if  he  will  spend  the  rest  of 
his  life  in  making  a  "glorious  Legend  of  Goode  Worn- 
men,"  and  will  send  it,  on  her  behalf,  to  the  English 
queen.  Chaucer  promises  solemnly,  and  as  soon  as  he 
wakes  betakes  himself  to  his  task. 

In  the  House  of  Fame,  where  he  sets  out  in  search  of 
"Love's  Tidings,"  as  well  as  in  the  Legend  of  Goode  Worn- 
men,  Chaucer  had  apparently  entered  upon 
the  task  of  constructing  a  work  which  would 
constitute  a  setting  for  a  group  of  tales;  but      National 
after   starting,   he  left  both   these   attempts      Chaucer, 
unfinished.     Yet  the  ambition  to  crown  his 
life  with  some  monumental  work  remained.     The  drift 
of  his  genius,  as  he  grew  older,  was  more  and  more  toward 
the  dramatic  perception  of  real  life.     He  had  a  wide  ex- 
perience of  men  of  all  ranks  and  conditions,  and  he  had 
been  storing  up  for  years,   with  his  keenly  observant, 
quiet  eyes,  the  materials  for  a  literary  presentation  of 
contemporary   society   upon   a   great   scale.     Moreover, 
while  Chaucer  was  growing  up,  England  had  been  grow- 
ing conscious  of  herself.     The  struggle  with  France  had, 
unified  the  people  at  last  into  a  homogeneous  body,  no ! 
longer  Norman  and  Saxon,  but  English;  and  the  brilliancy 
of  Edward  Ill's  early  reign  had  given  to  this  new  people 
their   first   intoxicating    draft   of    national   pride.      The 
growing  power  of  Parliament  tended  to  foster  the  feeling 
of  solidarity  and  self-consciousness  in  the  nation.     As  a 
member  of  Parliament,  as  a  government  officer,   as  an 
intimate  member  of  the  court,  Chaucer  felt  these  influ- 
ences to  the  full.     It  must  have  seemed  more  and  more 
important   to  him   that   the   crowning  work  of  his   life 


48  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

should  in  some  way  represent  the  varied  thought  and 
the  varied  external  spectacle  of  the  actual  society  in 
which  he  moved. 

With  the  happy  fortune  of  genius  he  hit,  in  his  Can- 
terbury  Tales,  upon   a  scheme  wonderfully  adapted   to 

the  ends  he  had  in  view.  Collections  of 
of  the  stories,  both  secular  and  sacred,  articulated 

"Canterbury     mf-o  a  general  framework,  had  been  numerous 

and  popular  in  the  Middle  Ages,  and  the 
Renaissance  inherited  the  taste  for  them,  while  enlarging 
their  scope,  and  humanizing  their  content.  Boccaccio 
had  furnished  one  example  of  throwing  a  graceful  trellis- 
work  of  incident  and  dialogue  about  the  separate  stories 
of  a  collection.  In  his  Decameron  a  company  of  aristo- 
cratic young  people  are  represented  as  having  taken 
refuge  from  the  plague  raging  in  Florence,  in  a  villa  on 
the  slopes  of  Fiesole.  They  wander  through  the  valleys 
of  oleanders  and  myrtles,  or  sit  beside  the  fountains  of 
the  villa  gardens,  and  beguile  the  time  with  tales  of  sen- 
timent and  intrigue.  Another  Italian,  Sercambi,  had 
pictured  a  pilgrimage  composed  of  many  classes  of  people, 
presided  over  by  a  leader  or  governor,  and  entertained  on 
their  journey  with  tales  narrated  by  an  official  story- 
teller, who  is  Sercambi  himself.  As  in  the  case  of  the 
fragments  of  the  Canterbury  Tales,  the  stories  are  linked 
together  by  transition  passages,  in  which  the  tales  are 
frequently  the  subject  of  comment.  Chaucer,  while 
adopting  a  similar  framework,  made  his  setting  much 
more  national  and  racy;  individualized  his  characters  so 
as  to  make  of  them  a  gallery  of  living  portraits  of  his 
time;  varied  his  tales  so  as  to  include  almost  all  the  types 
of  narrative  known  to  literature  at  the  close  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages;  and,  most  important  of  all,  put  his  tales  into 
the  mouths  of  the  separate  pilgrims. 

He  represents  himself  as  alighting,  one  spring  evening, 
at  the  Tabard  Inn,  in  Southwark,  a  suburb  at  the  south- 


THE  AGE   OF   CHAUCER  49 

ern  end  of  London  Bridge,  where  afterward  the  famous 
Elizabethan  playhouses,  Shakespeare's  among  them,  were 
to  arise.  Southwark  was  the  place  of  de- 
parture and  arrival  for  all  south-of-England  The  Pilgrims 
travel,  and  especially  for  pilgrimages  to  Tabard, 
the  world-renowned  shrine  of  Thomas  a 
Becket,  at  Canterbury.  A  company  bent  on  such  a  pil- 
grimage Chaucer  finds  gathered  in  the  inn;  he  makes 
their  acquaintance,  and  joins  himself  with  them  for  the 
journey.  Counting  the  poet,  they  are  thirty  in  all. 
There  is  a  Knight  lately  come  from  the  foreign  wars,  a 
man  who  has  fought  in  Prussia  and  in  Turkey,  jousted  in 
Tramisene,  and  been  present  at  the  storming  of  Alexan- 
dria— a  high-minded,  gentle-mannered,  knightly  adven- 
turer, type  of  the  courteous,  war-loving  chivalry  which 
was  passing  rapidly  away.  With  him  is  his  son,  a  young 
Squire,  curly-haired  and  gay,  his  short,  white-sleeved 
gown  embroidered  like  a  mead  with  red-and-white  flow- 
ers; he  is  an  epitome  of  the  gifts  and  graces  of  brilliant 
youth.  Their  servant  is  a  Yeoman,  in  coat  and  hood  of 
green,  a  sheaf  of  peacock-arrows  under  his  belt,  a  mighty 
bow  in  his  hand,  and  a  silver  image  of  Saint  Christopher 
upon  his  breast;  he  is  the  type  of  that  sturdy  English 
yeomanry  which  with  its  gray  goose  shafts  humbled  the 
pride  of  France  at  Crecy  and  Agincourt.  There  is  a 
whole  group  of  ecclesiastical  figures,  representing  in  their 
numbers  and  variety  the  diverse  activities  of  the  mediae- 
val church.  Most  of  them  are  satirical  portraits,  in  their 
worldliness  and  materialism  only  too  faithfully  represen- 
tative of  the  ecclesiastical  abuses  against  which  Wyclif 
struggled.  First  of  all  there  is  a  Monk,  who  cares  only 
for  hunting  and  good  cheer;  his  bald  head  shines  like 
glass,  his  bright  eyes  roll  in  his  head;  he  rides  a  sleek 
brown  palfrey,  and  has  "many  a  dainty  horse"  in  his 
stables;  his  sleeves  are  trimmed  with  fine  fur  at  the 
wrists,  his  hood  is  fastened  under  his  chin  with  a  gold 


50  A   HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

love-knot.  As  a  companion  figure  to  the  hunting  Monk, 
Chaucer  gives  us  "MadameEglantyne,"  the  Prioress;  she 
is  a  teacher  of-  young  ladies,  speaks  French  "  after  the 
school  of  Stratford-atte-bowe,"  is  exquisite  in  her  table- 
manners,  counterfeiting  as  well  as  she  can  the  stately 
behavior  of  the  court.  Other  ecclesiastics  are  there, 
hangers-on  and  caterpillars  of  the  church:  the  Friar, 
intimate  with  hospitable  franklins,  innkeepers,  and 
worthy  women,  and  despising  beggars  and  lazars;  the 
Summoner,  a  repulsive  person  with  "fire-red  cherubim 
face";  the  Pardoner,  with  his  bag  full  of  pardons  "come 
from  Rome  all  hot,"  and  of  bits  of  cloth  and  pig's  bones 
which  he  sells  as  relics  of  the  holy  saints.  Chaucer's 
treatment  of  these  evil  churchmen  is  highly  good-natured 
and  tolerant;  he  never  takes  the  tone  of  moral  indigna- 
tion against  them.  But  he  does  better;  he  sets  beside 
them,  as  the  type  of  true  shepherds  of  the  church,  a 
"poor  Parson,"  such  as,  partly  under  Wycli'f's  influence, 
had  spread  over  England,  beginning  that  great  movement 
for  the  purification  of  the  church  which  was  to  result, 
more  than  a  century  later,  in  the  Reformation.  Chaucer 
paints  the  character  of  the  Parson,  poor  in  this  world's 
goods,  but  "rich  of  holy  thought  and  work,"  with  loving 
and  reverent  touch.  The  Parson's  brother  travels  with 
him — a  Plowman,  a  "true  swinker  and  a  good,"  who 
helps  his  poor  neighbors  without  hire  and  loves  them  as 
himself;  he  reminds  us  of  Piers  the  Plowman,  in  the 
wonderful  Vision  which  is  the  antitype  of  Chaucer's 
work.  A  crowd  of  other  figures  fill  the  canvas.  There 
is  a  Shipman  from  the  west-country,  a  representative  of 
those  adventurous  seamen,  half  merchant-sailors,  half 
smugglers  and  pirates,  who  had  already  made  England's 
name  a  terror  on  the  seas  and  paved  the  way  for  her 
future  naval  and  commercial  supremacy.  There  is  a 
poor  Clerk  of  Oxford,  riding  a  horse  as  lean  as  a  rake,  and 
dressed  in  threadbare  cloak,  who  spends  all  that  he  can 


THE   AGE   OF   CHAUCER  51 

beg  or  borrow  upon  his  studies;  he  represents  that  pas- 
sion for  learning  which  was  already  astir  everywhere  in 
Europe,  and  which  was  awaiting  only  the  magic  touch 
of  the  new-found  classical  literature  to  blossom  out  into 
genuine  thought  and  imagination.  There  is  a  Merchant, 
in  a  Flemish  beaver  hat,  on  a  high  horse,  concealing,  with 
the  grave  importance  of  his  air,  the  fact  that  he  is  in 
dsbt.  There  is  a  group  of  guild-members,  in  the  livery 
of  their  guild,  all  worthy  to  be  aldermen;  together  with 
the  merchant,  they  represent  the  mercantile  and  manu- 
facturing activity  which  was  lifting  England  rapidly  to 
the  rank  of  a  great  commercial  power.  There  is  the 
Wife  of  Bath,  almost  a  modern  feminist  figure,  conceived 
with  masterly  humor  and  realism,  a  permanent  human 
type;  she  has  had  "husbands  five  at  church-door,"  and 
though  "somdel  deaf,"  hopes  to  live  to  wed  several 
others;  she  rides  on  an  ambler,  with  spurs  and  scarlet 
hose  on  her  feet,  and  on  her  head  a  hat  as  broad  as  a 
buckler.  These  and  a  dozen  others  are  all  painted  in 
vivid  colors,  and  with  a  psychological  truth  which  remind 
us  of  the  portraits  of  the  Flemish  painter,  Van  Eyck, 
Chaucer's  contemporary.  Taken  as  a  whole  they  repre- 
sent the  entire  range  of  English  society  in  the  fourteenth 
century,  with  the  exception  of  the  highest  aristocracy  and 
the  lowest  order  of  villeins  or  serfs. 

At  supper  this  goodly  company  hears  from  the  host  of 
the  Tabard  a  proposition  that  on  their  journey  to  Can- 
terbury,  to  beguile  the  tedium  of  the  ride, 
each  of  them  shall  tell  two  tales,  and  on  the    £jje  . 

'  Pilgrims 

homeward  journey  two  more.1     He  agrees  to    On  the  Road, 
travel  with  them,  to  act  as  master  of  cere- 
monies, and  on  their  return  to  render  judgment  as  to 

1  Counting  the  Host  and  the  Canon's  Yeoman  (who  joins  them  on  the 
road)  the  company  consisted  of  thirty-two  persons,  making  a  total  of  a 
hundred  and  twenty-eight  tales  to  be  told.  Less  than  a  fifth  of  this  num- 
ber were  actually  written,  and  several  of  these  were  left  fragmentary. 


52  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

who  has  told  the  best  story,  the  winner  to  be  given  a 
supper  at  the  general  expense.  So  it  is  agreed.  The 
next  morning  they  set  out  bright  and  early  on  their 
journey  southward  to  the  cathedral  city.  They  draw 
lots  to  determine  who  shall  tell  the  first  tale.  The  lot 
falls  to  the  Knight,  who  tells  the  charming  chivalric  story 
of  Palamon  and  Arcite.  When  it  is  finished  the  Host 
calls  upon  the  Monk  to  follow.  But  the  Miller,  who  is 
already  drunk  and  quarrelsome,  insists  on  being  heard, 
and  launches  forthwith  into  a  very  unedifying  tale  about 
a  carpenter.  The  Reeve,  who  had  followed  that  trade 
in  his  youth,  is  so  angry  that  he  retaliates  with  a  story 
of  an  unsavory  intrigue  in  which  a  miller  is  badly  worsted. 
The  Host  rises  in  his  stirrups  and  calls  on  the  Parson  for 
a  story,  "by  Goddes  dignitee!"  The  Parson  reproves 
him  for  swearing;  whereupon  the  Host  cries  that  he 
"smells  a  Lollard1  in  the  wind,"  and  bids  them  prepare 
for  a  sermon.  This  is  too  much  for  the  Shipman,  who 
breaks  in  impatiently.  When  the  Host  calls  upon  the 
Prioress,  he  changes  his  bluff  manner  to  correspond  with 
her  rank  and  excessive  refinement,  speaking  with  polite 
circumlocution,  "as  courteously  as  it  had  been  a  maid." 
The  Prioress  responds  graciously,  and  tells  the  story  of 
a  little  "clergeon,"  or  schoolboy,  who,  after  his  throat 
has  been  cut  by  the  wicked  Jews,  and  his  body  thrown 
into  a  pit,  still  sings  with  clear  young  voice  his  Alma 
Redemptoris  to  the  glory  of  the  Virgin.  Overwhelmed 
with  emotion,  the  company  is  riding  silently  along,  when 
the  Host,  to  break  the  awe-struck  mood,  turns  to  Chau- 
cer, and  begins  to  joke  him  upon  his  corpulency : 


"What  man  artow?"  quod  he; 
"Thou  lookest  as  thou  wouldest  find  an  hare, 
For  ever  upon  the  ground  I  see  thee  stare. 
Approache  near,  and  look  up  merrily. 

'The  Mowers  of  Wyclif  were  called  Lollards. 


THE  AGE   OF   CHAUCER  53 

Now  ware  you,  sirs,  and  let  this  man  have  place; 
He  seemeth  elvish  by  his  countenance 
For  unto  no  wight  doeth  he  dalliance." 


Chaucer,  thus  rallied,  begins  a  travesty  of  those  doggerel 
rhymes  of  knightly  adventure  to  which  many  of  the 
romances  of  chivalry  had  in  his  day  degenerated.  The 
Rhyme  of  Sir  -Thopas  is  a  capital  burlesque  of  a  style  of 
poetry  which  Chaucer  himself  had  come  to  supplant. 
He  has  not  got  far  before  the  Host  cries  out  upon  the 
"drasty  rhyming,"  and  Chaucer  meekly  agrees  to  con- 
tribute instead  "a  little  thing  in  prose,"  a  "moral  tale"; 
and  he  proceeds  with  the  long  story  of  Melibeus  and  his 
wife  Prudence,  a  very  tedious  story  indeed  from  the 
modern  point  of  view.  The  Squire's  tale,  as  befits  his 
years  and  disposition,  is  a  highly  colored  Oriental  tale  of 
love,  adventure,  and  magic,  in  which  figure  a  flying  horse 
of  brass  and  other  wonders.  The  Pardoner,  called  on 
for  "some  merry  tale  or  jape,"  but  restricted  by  the  gen- 
tles to  "some  moral  thing,"  preaches  one  of  the  sermons 
that  he  knows  by  rote — a  startlingly  vivid  and  vigorous 
short  story  about  three  "rioters"  who  go  in  search  of 
Death,  and  who  find  him  in  a  pile  of  gold. 

So  the  stories  continue,  the  transition  passages  con- 
stantly picturing  the  vivid  dialogue  and  action  of  the 
pilgrims,  at  times  one  theme  being  carried  through  several 
tales  in  succession.  The  Wife  of  Bath,  after  a  long  pro- 
logue in  which  she  describes  the  vigorous  measures  by 
which  she  has  ruled  her  five  husbands,  tells  a  tale  the 
point  of  which  is  that  marital  happiness  results  only  if 
sovereignty  in  marriage  is  vested  in  the  wife.  After  the 
Friar  and  the  Summoner  have  told  vulgar  stories  about 
each  other,  the  Clerk  of  Oxford  resumes  the  theme  intro- 
duced by  the  Wife,  with  the  story  of  the  infinite,  nay, 
incredible  patience  of  Griselda  under  the  tests  imposed 
by  her  husband  Walter — a  tale  borrowed  from  the  Latin 


54  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  Petrarch,  who  had  translated  it  from  Boccaccio's  De- 
cameron. Finally,  the  Franklin  tells  a  tale  of  gentilesse, 
in  which  the  husband  and  the  wife,  exhibiting  mutual  for- 
Dearance  and  courtesy,  appear  to  solve  the  problem  mosc 
satisfactorily  of  all. 

In  the  sixteenth  century  and  later,  when  owing  to  the 
change  in  the  pronunciation  of  words  (especially  the  loss 
of  a  final  "e"  from  thousands  of  words  and 
Poeti^Art  grammatical  forms),  the  secret  of  Chaucer's 
versification  was  lost,  he  was  regarded  as  a 
barbarous  writer,  ignorant  of  prosody,  and  with  no  ear 
for  the  melody  of  verse.  The  exact  contrary  of  this  was 
really  the  case.  He  was  an  artist  in  verse-effects,  who 
not  only  wrote  with  a  metrical  accuracy,  fluency,  and 
variety  that  has  rarely  been  surpassed,  but  who  also 
paid  constant  and  delicate  heed  to  the  niceties  of  rhythm 
and  tone-color.  In  a  half-humorous  address  to  his 
scrivener  Adam,  he  calls  down  curses  upon  that  un- 
worthy servant  for  spoiling  good  verses  by  bad  copying, 
and  in  Troilus  he  beseeches  his  readers  not  to  "mis- 
metre"  his  book.  From  his  very  earliest  poems  his 
work  is  in  all  formal  details  faultless ;  and  as  he  progressed 
in  skill  his  music  became  constantly  more  varied  and 
flexible.  His  early  manner  reaches  its  height  in  the 
exquisite  rondel,  intricate  in  form  but  handled  with  great 
simplicity  of  effect,  which  brings  the  Parlement  of  Foules 
to  a  melodious  close:  A  good  example  of  his  later  music 
may  be  found  in  the  description  of  the  Temple  of  Venus 
in  the  "Knight's  Tale";  or,  as  a  study  in  a  graver  key, 
in  the  ballad  "Flee  fro  the  Press,"  which  marks  so  im- 
pressively the  deepening  seriousness  of  Chaucer's  mind 
in  his  last  years. 

Chaucer  employed  three  principal  metres:  the  eight- 
syllable  line,  rhyming  in  couplets,  as  in  the  Boke  of  the 
Duchesse;  the  ten-syllable  line,  also  rhyming  in  couplets, 
as  in  the  prologue  to  the  Canterbury  Tales;  and  the  same 


THE  AGE   OF  CHAUCER  55 

line  arranged  in  seven-line  stanzas  (known  later  as 
" rhyme  royal"),  as  in  Troilus.  The  heroic  couplet  he 
introduced  into  English  verse;  the  rhyme  royal  he  in- 
vented. In  his  shorter  poems  he  made,  however,  endless 
metrical  experiments,  and  showed  a  mastery  of  intricate 
verse-forms,  remarkable  even  in  an  age  when  the  French 
had  made  verse- writing  a  matter  of  almost  gymnastic  skill. 
As  for  his  material,  Chaucer  did  not  hesitate  to  take 
what  suited  him,  wherever  he  found  it;  sometimes  bor- 
rowing wholesale  without  change,  oftener 
adapting  and  reworking  his  matter  freely. 
Any  such  thing  as  "originality,"  in  the  mod- 
ern sense,  was  undreamed  of  in  the  Middle  Ages;  the 
material  of  literature  was  common  property,  and  the 
same  stories  were  endlessly  repeated.  Whoever  would 
learn  the  "sources"  from  which  Chaucer  drew  must  ran- 
sack the  storehouse  of  mediaeval  fiction,  and  examine  no 
little  of  mediaeval  science  and  philosophy.  Chaucer's 
was  the  only  originality  then  possible — he  improved 
whatever  he  borrowed,  and  stamped  it  with  his  individ- 
uality of  thought  and  style  and  structural  skill.  That 
part  of  his  work  which  we  value  most,  however,  such  as 
the  prologues  to  the  Legend  of  Goode  Wommen  and  to  the 
Canterbury  Tales,  was  original  in  every  sense;  and  some 
of  the  Tales  have  been  so  radically  and  vitally  remod- 
elled that  they  stand  as  genuinely  original. 

II 

Chaucer  lived  and  wrote  in  a  world  where  the  half- 
shadows   of   the  Middle  Ages  were  only  beginning  to 
scatter  before  the  clear  dawn-light  of  mod- 
ern culture.     He,  first  of  all  men  in  England, 
reacted  to  that  stimulating  and  emancipating 
movement  called  the  Renaissance,  as  it  seethed  in  the 
souls  of  men  beyond  the  Alps;  and  his  artistic  conscious- 


56  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ness  was  stirred  out  of  the  rigid  bonds,  the  cramping  con- 
ventionalities, the  narrow  inhibitions  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
From  them  he  emerged  into  the  world  of  living  actuali- 
ties that  he  exhibits  in  his  powerful  later  work.  In  this 
he  was  far  beyond  his  age.  The  full  force  of  his  original- 
ity is  most  evident  when  he  is  compared  with  John* 
Gower — the  "moral  Gower"  to  whom  he  dedicated  his 
Troilus.  Chaucer,  in  his  mature  work,  looks  forward  to 
the  England  of  the  Tudors;  Gower  is  still  tramping  in  the 
treadmill  of  mediaeval  abstraction  and  prisoned  thought. 
John  Gower  (1325-1408)  was  an  aristocratic,  conserva- 
tive landed  gentleman,  with  rich  manors  in  Kent  and 
elsewhere.  He  was  known  at  court,  where 

John  Gower.      .  .  .  . 

his  poetry  met  with  much  appreciation.  He 
was  extremely  pious;  in  his  old  age  he  resided  in  lodgings 
inside  the  priory  of  St.  Mary  Overy  (now  St.  Saviour's) 
in  Southwark,  not  far  from  the  Tabard  Inn  which  Chau- 
cer had  made  famous.  Here  he  spent  his  last  days  in 
devout  observances;  and  here  his  sculptured  figure  can 
still  be  seen  on  his  tomb,  his  head,  crowned  with  roses, 
pillowed  upon  his  three  chief  volumes.  Each  of  these 
was  written  in  a  different  tongue:  the  Speculum  Meditan- 
tis  in  French,  the  Vox  Clamantis  in  Latin,  and  the  Con- 
fessio  Amantis  in  English.  This  diversity  in  the  choice 
of  language  shows  clearly  the  opinion  of  the  age — that 
the  English  tongue  was  not,  as  yet,  obviously  the  one 
instrument  of  literary  expression. 

The  Speculum  Meditantis,  or  Mirour  de  I'Omme,  con- 
sists of  an  elaborate  allegory  of  the  attacks  of  the  seven 

deadly  sins  and  then"  offspring  upon  man- 
"SC  cuium  kind;  a  complete  review  of  the  state  of  the 
Meditantis."  world  and  of  its  corruptions,  in  which  are 

vividly  pictured  the  wickedness  of  London, 
its  dram-shops,  its  cheating  merchants  and  shopkeepers, 
its  slothful  monks  and  friars,  its  vulture-like  lawyers,  and 
its  lazy  and  rebellious  laborers;  finally,  there  is  presented 


THE   AGE   OF   CHAUCER  57 

a  plan  of  salvation,  consisting  of  the  intervention  of  the 
Virgin  Mary,  whose  history  is  narrated,  together  with 
the  whole  story  of  the  gospel  narrative.  The  work  as  a 
whole  is  systematically  conceived  and  executed.  The 
tone  is  one  of  moral  earnestness,  and  the  vignettes  of 
contemporary  life  are  painted  with  color  and  vigor. 

The  Confessio  Amantis,  like  the  Canterbury  Tales,  is. 
a  collection  of  stories.     A  lover  makes  confession  to  a. 
priest  of  Venus,  a  learned  old  man  named 
Genius,  and  the  stories  are  narrated  by  this      The 

.     .  j       ,!  r  •  A.  i   •  Confessio. 

priest  for  the  purpose  of  imparting  moral  in-      AmantLs."- 
struction.     Though  the  design  is  occasionally 
marred  by  digressions,  in  general  the  structure  of  the 
poem   is   carefully  planned   and   executed:   each   of   the 
seven  deadly  sins,  with  five  branches,  is  shown  to  be  ap- 
plicable to  love  and  lovers,  and  one  or  more  stories  are 
told  to  illustrate  and  reprove  each  of  the  sins,  although 
the  application  of  some  of  the  tales  is  rather  forced. 

The  Vox  Clamantis  is  interesting  for  historical  reasons. 
The  second  half  of  the  fourteenth  century  was  a  time  of 
revolutionary  changes  among  the  peasants 
of  England.  Four  terrible  attacks  of  the 
Black  Death,  the  first  in  1348,  the  last  in 
1375,  swept  over  the  country,  destroying  over  a  third  of 
the  population.  For  a  long  time  the  old  feudal  system 
known  as  "villeinage,"  according  to  which  all  agriculture 
was  carried  on  for  the  lord  of  the  manor  by  serfs  bound 
to  the  land,  had  been  in  process  of  decay,  giving  way  to 
a  combination  of  renting  to  free  farmers  (like  Chaucer's 
Plowman),  and  of  hiring  landless  laborers,  who  wandered 
from  district  to  district,  wherever  attracted  by  high 
wages.  The  destruction  of  such  a  huge  number  of  la- 
borers by  the  plague  resulted  in  an  enormous  decrease 
in  the  production  of  food,  and,  as  a  result  of  the  dislo- 
cation of  the  labor  market  due  to  the  demand  for  work- 
ers, villeinage  practically  disappeared.  The  condition  of 


58  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  survivors,  however,  was  not  very  greatly  improved, 
for  the  short  crops,  the  long  periods  of  idleness  between 
harvest  and  plowing,  and  especially  the  statutes,  passed 
by  Parliament,  attempting  to  reduce  wages  to  the  scale 
prevailing  before  the  plague,  produced  wide-spread  hun- 
ger and  discontent.  The  exactions  of  the  church,  the 
extravagances  of  Edward  III,  and  the  heavy  cost  of  his 
foreign  wars,  added  to  the  burden  borne  by  the  dis 
tracted  peasantry.  The  fearlessness  with  which  the 
Oxford  reformer,  John  Wyclif,  attacked  the  corruptions 
of  the  clergy,  and  questioned  the  fundamental  rights  of 
property,  was  like  flame  to  the  fuel  of  discontent.  Ir< 
1381  a  nation-wide  uprising  of  the  peasants  occurred, 
under  the  leadership  of  Wat  Tyler,  Jack  Straw,  and  a 
socialist  priest  of  Kent,  named  John  Balle.  They  marched 
on  London,  sacked  the  Tower  and  the  Savoy  palace,  and 
murdered  an  archbishop;  it  seemed  as  if  the  throne  anc] 
the  whole  social  order  were  about  to  be  overturned.  It 
was  this  state  of  things  which  prompted  Gower  to  write 
his  Vox  Clamantis.  As  a  landowner  in  Kent,  he  felt  the 
full  brunt  of  the  disturbance.  He  writes  from  the  aris 
tocratic  point  of  view,  representing  the  common  people 
as  beasts,  oxen,  dogs,  flies,  and  frogs,  because  of  the  evil 
magic  of  the  time.  The  poem  is  full  of  horror  and  dis 
may  at  the  social  volcano  which  had  opened  for  a  mo- 
ment, threatening  to  engulf  the  nation. 

John  Wyclif  (i32o?-i384),  the  man  who  by  his  teach- 
1  ing  had  helped,  though  unintentionally,  to  foment  the 
John  w  clif  Peasant  rebellion,  was  primarily  a  theologian, 
and  religious  reformer.  His  connection  with 
English  literature  is,  in  a  sense,  accidental,  but  it  is 
nevertheless  very  important.  He  attacked  the  temporal 
power  of  the  church,  advocating,  partly  in  the  interests 
of  the  overburdened  poor,  the  appropriation  by  the  state 
of  all  church  property,  especially  of  land.  While  waging 
a  war  of  theory  on  this  and  other  ecclesiastical  questions. 


THE  AGE   OF    CHAUCER  59 

he  planned  and  carried  out  a  great  practical  movement, 
known  as  the  Lollard  movement,  for  arousing  the  com- 
mon people  to  a  more  vital  religious  life.  He  sent  out 
simple,  devoted  men  to  preach  the  gospel  in  the  native 
tongue,  and  to  bring  home  to  their  hearers  the  living 
truths  of  religion  which  the  formalism  of  the  mediaeval 
church  had  obscured.  These  "poor  priests,"  dressed  in 
coarse  russet  robes  and  carrying  staves,  travelled  through 
the  length  and  breadth  of  the  land,  as  Wesley's  preachers 
travelled  four  centuries  later,  calling  men  back  to  the 
simple  faith  of  early  apostolic  times. 

Wyclif  and  his  Lollard  priests  began  the  great  Protes- 
tant appeal  from  the  dogmas  of  the  church  to  the  Bible 
which  culminated,  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
in  Luther  and  the  Reformation.     In  order  to  Bible'*'8 

make  this  appeal  effective  with  the  masses, 
Wyclif  not  only  wrote  numerous  tracts  and  sermons  in 
homely,  vigorous  speech  for  the  common  people,  but  also 
undertook  to  translate  the  whole  of  the  Bible  into  Eng- 
lish. With  the  assistance  of  Nicholas  of  Hereford  he 
completed  his  great  task  before  his  death  in  1384.  Wyc- 
lif's  Bible  was  revised  and  rendered  into  more  idiomatic 
language  a  few  years  later  by  John  Purvey,  and  received 
its  final  form  some  time  before  the  end  of  the  century. 
It  is  one  of  the  first  great  prose  monuments  in  English, 
and  its  wide  popularity,  in  spite  of  the  occasional  stiff 
and  unidiomatic  "translation-English," 'rendered  it  in- 
fluential in  gaining  for  the  vernacular  a  position  of  dig- 
nity and  honor. 

The  peasant  rebellion  and  the  Lollard  agitation  give 
us  glimpses  of  an  England  which  Chaucer,  in  spite  of  the 
many-sidedness  of  his  work,  did  not  reveal. 
The  Canterbury  Tales  contain  few  references 
to  the  plague,  only  one  to  the  peasant  upris- 
ing, and  only  one  to  Lollardry,  and  these  references  are 
casual  or  jesting.  Chaucer  wrote  for  the  court  and  cul- 


60  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

tivated  classes,  to  whom  the  sufferings  of  the  poor  were 
a  matter  of  the  utmost  indifference.  He  is  often  serious, 
sometimes  nobly  so;  but  intense  moral  indignation  and 
exalted  spiritual  rapture  were  foreign  to  his  artistic,  gay, 
tolerant  disposition.  In  his  graceful  worldliness,  his  de- 
light in  the  bright  pageantry  of  life,  he  shows  himself  to 
be  an  adherent  of  the  nobility,  a  follower  of  the  Norman- 
French  literary  school;  the  other  side  of  the  English 
nature,  its  sombre,  puritanical,  moralizing  side,  found  ex- 
pression in  a  group  of  poems  which  have  until  recently 
been  ascribed  to  one  author  (William  Langland),  and 
which  have  been  called  the  Vision  Concerning  Piers  the 
Plowman.  Although  the  question  of  the  unity  or  diver- 
sity of  authorship  of  these  poems  is  still  involved  in  con- 
troversy, the  position  of  the  adherents  of  the  older  view 
has  been  so  seriously  undermined  that  we  are  now  obliged 
at  least  to  discard  completely  the  inferential  biography 
of  the  author,  which  had  been  based  solely  on  half-hints 
and  imaginative  details  contained  in  the  poems.  The 
three  poems  comprise  an  original  version  and  two  succes- 
sive revisions,  the  two  latter  being  about  three  times  as 
long  as  the  former.  It  is  profitable  to  consider  the  earli- 
est version  (1362)  first. 

The  poem  is  thrown  into  the  dream  or  vision  form 
made  fashionable  by  the  Roman  de  la  Rose.  On  a  May 
morning,  "weary  forwandered,"  the  poet  leans 
beside  a  brook,  and,  lulled  by  the  soft  music 
of  the  waters,  falls  asleep.  In  a  dream  he 
sees  a  high  Tower  in  the  east,  a  dark  Dungeon  in  a 
deep  dale  in  the  west,  and  in  between  a  fair  Field  full 
of  folk,  working  and  wandering.  Here  are  plowmen  and 
wasters,  proud  ladies  and  gentlemen  of  fashion,  hermits, 
peddlers,  minstrels,  lazy  beggars,  lying  pilgrims,  preach- 
ing friars,  a  fraudulent  pardoner,  absentee  priests,  un- 
scrupulous lawyers,  barons,  townspeople,  and  serfs;  some 
are  good,  some  are  wicked,  most  are  greedy,  lazy,  rapa- 


THE   AGE    OF   CHAUCER  6 1 

cious.  Suddenly  a  lovely  Lady,  Holy  Church,  descends 
from  the  mountain,  and  explains  to  the  dreamer  that  the 
Tower  is  the  abode  of  God  the  Father,  who  is  the  spirit 
of  Truth.  Truth,  she  says,  consists  in  loving  God  and 
being  charitable  to  men.  From  the  Tower  the  dreamer 
turns  to  the  Dungeon,  from  which  streams  a  retinue  of 
rascals  in  the  train  of  Falsehood,  the  son  of  Wrong,  who 
is  the  lord  of  evil.  Falsehood  is  about  to  marry  Lady 
Meed,  the  allegorical  representative  of  the  greed  of  the 
people  in  the  Field,  but  Theology  forbids  the  marriage, 
and  in  order  to  obtain  leave  Meed  and  Falsehood  are 
required  to  go  to  the  King's  court.  On  their  way  the 
King  orders  the  arrest  of  the  mob  of  rascals,  who  dis- 
perse in  a  panic,  and  Lady  Meed  alone  is  brought  to  trial. 
Here  she  attempts  to  marry  the  King's  greatest  Knight, 
who  is  named  Conscience,  but  the  latter  refuses  until  she 
obtains  the  consent  of  Reason.  Before  Reason  can  ren- 
der judgment,  Meed  is  caught  red-handed  in  the  act  of 
bribing  the  King's  officials  to  release  a  criminal,  and  in 
a  stinging  speech  of  denunciation  by  Reason  is  forever 
debarred  from  pleading  before  the  King.  Reason  con- 
cludes with  the  assertion  that  the  royal  domain  can  be 
made  righteous  and  happy  only  if  he  and  Conscience  rule 
over  it.  Immediately  the  dreamer  sees  Conscience  and 
Repentance  preaching  to  the  Field  full  of  folk,  who,  in 
the  form  of  personified  Deadly  Sins,  confess,  repent,  and 
promise  to  seek  for  Truth.  But  no  one  knows  the  way 
thither,  not  even  a  Palmer  who  has  visited  every  shrine 
on  earth,  till  Piers,  the  old,  faithful  Plowman,  ventures 
to  tell  them  how  to  find  and  follow  the  path.  It  leads 
through  Meekness,  Conscience,  love  of  God  and  man, 
and  the  Ten  Commandments  (represented  as  almost  im- 
passable rivers,  mountains,  and  forests),  after  which  will 
be  seen  the  Tower  of  Truth,  surrounded  by  a  moat  of 
Mercy,  and  guarded  by  Grace.  Entrance  can  be  secured 
only  through  the  Seven  Virtues — the  antitheses  of  the 


.62  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Deadly  Sins.  The  pilgrims  despair  over  the  difficulties, 
and  beg  Piers  to  lead  them,  but  he  refuses  until  he  has 
finished  his  plowing,  sowing,  and  harvesting,  and  in  the 
meantime  commands  them  all  to  assist  him.  Many  re- 
fuse to  work,  and  Piers  calls  in  Hunger,  who  beats  them 
and  feeds  them  only  on  beans,  barley-bread,  and  water. 
At  the  harvest  some  become  arrogant,  and  refuse  to  work 
save  for  high  wages,  in  spite  of  the  renewed  warnings  of 
Hunger.  Finally,  Truth  sends  Piers  a  pardon,  under  the 
terms  of  which  only  those  who  aid  him  are  to  be  admitted 
to  the  Tower.  The  pardon  reads,  "Those  who  do  good 
shall  enter  eternal  life,  but  those  who  do  evil  shall  suffer 
in  eternal  fire."  In  a  dispute  over  the  meaning  of  the 
pardon,  Piers  and  a  priest  jangle  so  loudly  that  the, 
dreamer  awakes. 

Even  to  the  shortest  form  of  the  poem  as  just  given, 
several  cantos  were  added,  which,  however,  in  vigor  and 
structural  power,  fall  far  below  the  work  of  thii 
fi*8*  writer.      Twice  afterward  (1377,  1386  - 
1398)  the  poem  was  augmented  by  many  more 
cantos,  and   was  extensively  remodelled.      A  definitely 
planned  allegory,  with  the  systematic  action  of  its  living 
and   moving   figures,   however,  was   beyond   the  power 
of  the  later  writers.      Nor  did  they  see  or  understand 
the  social  abuses  so  clearly,  nor  could  they  propose  so  defi- 
nite a  remedy.     Their  work  is  full  of  poetic  lines  and  of 
powerful  short  passages,  but  it  lacks  form  and  structure. 
The  name  of  Piers  the  Plowman  was  used  as  a  rallying 
cry  in  the  peasant  uprising.     The  poet's  sense  of  equality 
of  all  men  before  God,  his  hatred  of  social 
fhe'poem.        falsities  and  hypocrisies,  his  belief  in  the  dig- 
nity of  labor,  give  almost  a  modern  tone  to 
his  poem,  in  spite  of  its  archaic  metrical  form,  and  its 
mediaeval  allegorical  machinery.     His  deep  religious  sense 
and  the  power  of  his  feeling  of  social  duty  are  neither 
ancient  nor  modern,  but  of  all  time. 


THE  AGE   OF  CHAUCER  63 

The  metrical  form  which  this  poet  chose  again  con- 
trasts him  sharply  with  Chaucer.  Chaucer  threw  in  his 
lot  from  the  first  with,  the  new  versification 
imported  from  France,  depending  upon  regu-  Form.**"**1 
Jar  accent,  a  fixed  number  of  syllables,  and 
rhyme;  and  he  developed  this  in  such  a  way  as  to  pro- 
duce with  it  a  rich  and  finished  music.  By  his  choice  of 
the  French  system  he  puts  himself  in  line  with  the  future 
of  English  verse,  even  though  the  tradition  he  began  was 
Jost  for  a  time  in  the  fifteenth  century.  The  author  of 
Piers  the  Plowman,  either  because  he  knew  that  his  popu- 
lar audience  would  be  more  deeply  moved  by  the  ancient 
and  traditional  rhythms  of  the  nation,  or  because  these 
were  more  natural  to  himself,  adopted  the  old  system  of 
native  versification  which  depended  upon  a  fixed  number 
of  accents  (four)  and  alliteration  for  its  metrical  struc- 
ture, and  allowed  great  irregularity  both  in  the  position 
of  stressed  syllables  and  in  the  number  of  syllables  in  the 
liine.  The  opening  verses  of  the  poem  will  serve  as  a 
iipecimen: 

In  a  somer  season     .     whan  soft  was  the  sonne, 
I  shope  me  in  shroudes     .     as  I  a  shepe  were 
In  habit  as  an  hermit     .     unholy  of  workes ; 
Went  wide  in  this  worlde    .    wondres  to  here.1 

This  metre  is,  to  a  modern  ear,  somewhat  monotonous 
and  uncouth.  It  adapts  itself  much  better  to  recitation 
than  to  reading  with  the  eye.  However  we 
account  for  it,  the  fact  that  the  Vision  is 
written  in  this  antique  and  rapidly  dying 
verse  form,  has  told  against  it.  From  Chaucer,  from 
France  and  Italy,  flows  the  whole  stream  of  later  verse. 

1  The  caesura,  or  heavy  pause  in  the  middle  of  each  line,  is  marked  by  a 
dot.  The  alliterative  syllables,  of  which  there  are  usually  two  in  the  first 
half,  and  one  in  the  second  half,  are  stressed.  There  are  normally  four 
stresses  hi  the  line. 


64  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Piers  the  Plowman  has  had  no  modern  literary  offspring, 
even  though  it  was  imitated  a  number  of  times  in  its 
own  and  the  following  century. 

But  the  work  of  the  poet  who  wrote  the  earliest  version 
has  suffered  most  in  modern  criticism,  because  it  has  not 
been  carefully  distinguished  from  that  of  the  later  con- 
tinuators  and  adapters.  Their  work  is  confused  in  plan, 
bewildered  with  detail,  full  of  breaks  and  structureless 
transitions.  Its  total  effect  is  majestic  only  because  of 
the  force  of  imagination  behind  it,  but  it  is  not  artistic. 
It  lacks  the  clear,  firm  outline,  and  the  harmonious  pro- 
portion, which  the  first  poet  attained,  and  which  likewise 
Chaucer's  supreme  artistic  sense  enabled  him  to  attain  in 
his  later  years. 

That  Chaucer  was  far  in  advance  of  his  time  becomes 

clear  when  we  note  how  persistently  his  fifteenth  century 

successors  turned  back  to  him  icr  inspiration, 

Imitators  of        as  to  jjjgj,. 

Chaucer  and 

Gower-  "  Fader  dere  and  maister  reverent," 

and  found  themselves  unable  to  do  more  than  awkwardly 
or  pallidly  imitate  him.  The  chief  among  these  imitators 
was  John  Lydgate,  a  monk  of  Bury  St.  Edmunds,  who 
began  making  verses  before  Chaucer's  death,  and  died  be- 
fore the  outbreak  of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  His  Story  of 
Thebes,  based  on  Boccaccio  and  Statius,  pretends  to  be 
told  as  one  of  the  Canterbury  Tales;  the  poet  in  his  pro- 
logue feigns  to  have  joined  the  pilgrims  at  Canterbury, 
and  at  the  Host's  request  tells  the  story  on  the  homeward 
journey.  The  device  illustrates  clearly  the  lack  of  origi- 
nality of  Lydgate  and  his  brother  poets.  Lydgate's  verse, 
moreover,  is  markedly  halting  and  tuneless.  In  this  re- 
spect Thomas  Occleve  or  Hoccleve  (1370  7-1450?)  was  a 
better  disciple.  He  perhaps  had  the  benefit  of  Chaucer's 
personal  acquaintance  and  instruction,  loved  and  mourned 
him  deeply,  and  preserved,  in  the  manuscript  of  his  Gov- 


THE  AGE   OF  CHAUCER  65 

email  of  Princes  (written  for  the  Prince  of  Wales,  after- 
ward Henry  V),  the  well-known  portrait  of  Chaucer  as  a 
gray-haired  old  man,  hooded  and  gowned. 

A  third  poet  who  continued  the  master's  tradition 
(with  a  good  sprinkling  of  Gower,  to  be  sure)  has  lived  in 
literary  history  as  much  by  the  picturesque-  . 

*  -  J  J  James  I  of 

ness  of  his  personal  story  as  by  his  poetry,  Scotland  and 
which  is  nevertheless  charming  in  its  kind,  "^^p11^'5 
This  is  the  young  Stuart  prince,  afterward 
James  I  of  Scotland,  who  was  captured  by  English  sailors 
in  1405,  and  spent  the  next  nineteen  years  in  England, 
as  a  prisoner,  in  the  Tower  of  London,  Windsor  Castle, 
and  other  strongholds.  At  the  time  of  his  capture  he 
was  a  child  of  eleven.  As  he  grew  up  in  solitude  he 
turned  for  diversion  to  poetry  and  music — arts  in  which 
the  Scottish  kings  were  traditionally  proficient.  One  day, 
from  the  windows  of  Windsor  Castle,  he  saw  a  beautiful 
young  girl  walking  in  the  garden  below,  as  Palamo$  saw 
the  fair  Emilie  in  the  ''Knight's  Tale."  The  story  of 
his  love  for  Jane  Beaufort  and  its  happy  outcome  the 
young  prince  told  with  tenderness  and  fancy  in  his 
King's  Quair.  It  is  written  in  the  seven-line  pentameter 
stanza1  invented  by  Chaucer  and  repeatedly  used  by  him, 
though,  in  deference  to  the  princely  poet,  it  has  since 
been  known  as  "rhyme  royal."  Both  the  style  and  plan 
of  the  King's  Quair  are  imitated  from  the  artificial  French 
poetry  from  which  Chaucer  more  and  more  departed  as 
he  grew  in  original  power,  but  from  which  neither  Gower 
nor  the  Chaucerian  imitators  delivered  themselves.  It 
is  significant  of  the  failure  of  these  imitators  to  perceive 
the  immense  originality  of  Chaucer's  later  work,  that 
they  frequently  put  Gower  on  a  level  with  him.  In  the 
Envoy  of  the  King's  Quair  James  recommends  his  "litel 
boke,  nakit  of  eloquence," 

1  Rhyming  a,  b,  a,  b,  b,  c,  c. 


66  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Unto  the  ympnes  (hymns)  of  my  maisters  dere, 
Gowere  and  Chaucere,  that  on  steppis  salt 
Of  rhetorike  whil  they  were  lyvand  here, 
Superlative  as  poets  laureate, 


and  he  brings  the  poem  to  a  close  with  a  prayer  that 
their  souls  may  together  enjoy  the  bliss  of  heaven.  When 
In  1424  the  prince,  on  the  eve  of  release  from  his  long 
captivity,  was  married  to  the  lady  whom  he  had  cele- 
brated in  the  King's  Quair,  his  reverence  for  Gower 
prompted  him  to  have  the  wedding  held  in  the  church 
of  St.  Saviour's,  where  the  old  poet  lay  buried. 

The  fifteenth  century  is  often  characterized  as  a  period 
barren  of  poetic  production.  This  is  true  only  so  far  as 

it  implies  the  absence  of  genius.  Quantita- 
Fifteenth-  tively  the  fifteenth  century  was  more  pro- 
Poetryf  h'fic  of  English  poetry  (and  prose)  than  any 

preceding  century.  The  enormous  growth  of 
English  commerce  and  industry,  and  the  consequent  rise 
of  the  middle  classes  in  number,  wealth,  and  leisure,  re- 
sulted in  a  voracious  public  appetite  for  the  output  of 
literary  mediocrity,  a  large  part  of  which  is  purely  utili- 
tarian. The  number  of  third-rate  writers  is  very  large 
— the  works  of  over  three  hundred  have  been  printed — 
and  the  quantity  of  their  output  is  surprising.  But  the 
fact  remains  that  the  freshest  and  most  spontaneous  work 
is  of  popular  origin.  Songs  and  carols,  ballads,  and  new 
and  remodelled  plays  of  all  sorts  constitute  the  finest 
literature  of  the  century. 

The  English  popular  ballad  has  been  defined  as  "a 
narrative  poem  without  any  known  author  or  any  marks 
of  individual  authorship,  such  as  sentiment  and  reflection, 
meant  in  the  first  instance  for  singing,  and  connected,  as 
its  name  implies,  with  the  communal  dance,  but  sub- 
mitted to  a  process  of  oral  tradition  among  people  free 
from  literary  influences  and  fairly  homogeneous."  These 


THE  AGE    OF   CHAUCER  67 

ballads  appear  to  have  flourished  luxuriantly  among  the 
folk  in  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries,  after  which 
their  composition  ceased.  Over  three  hundred  of  them, 
in  1,300  versions,  have  survived,  and  have  been  collected 
and  printed,  the  earliest  collection  being  that  in  Bishop 
Percy's  Reliques  of  Ancient  Popular  Poetry,  the  publica- 
tion of  which  in  1765  aroused  the  keenest  interest.  These 
ballads  in  the  main  are  of  two  different  types,  one  pre- 
senting an  emotional  situation,  often  tragic,  in  short 
stanzas,  with  a  refrain  and  with  much  repetition;  the 
other,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Robin  Hood  ballads,  offering  a 
rather  extended  narrative  in  stanzas  of  four  lines,  the 
second  and  fourth  lines  rhyming.  The  former  may  be 
Illustrated  by  the  following: 

Lully,  lulley,  lully,  lulley, 

The  fawcon  hath  born  my  make1  away. 

He  bare  hym  up,  he  bare  hym  down, 

He  bare  hym  into  an  orchard  browne.     (Refrain.) 

In  that  orchard  there  was  an  halle, 

That  Was  hangid  with  purpill  and  pall.     (Ref.) 

And  in  that  hall  there  was  a  bede; 

Hit  was  hangid  with  gold  so  rede.     (Ref.) 

And  yn  that  bed  there  lythe  a  knyght, 

His  wowndis  bledyng  day  and  nyght.     (Ref.) 

By  that  bede  side  kneleth  a  may,2 

And  she  wepeth  both  nyght  and  day.     (Ref.) 

One  of  the  best  known  of  the  Robin  Hood  ballads,  that 
entitled  Robin  Hood  and  the  Monk,  opens  with  the  follow- 
ing musical  and  picturesque  stanzas: 

In  somer,  when  the  shawes3  be  sheyne,4 
And  leves  be  large  and  long, 

>Mate.  2Maid.  3  Groves.  4  Beautiful. 


68  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Hit  is  full  mery1  in  feyre  foreste 

To  here  the  foulys2  song. 
To  se  the  dere  drawe  to  the  dale, 

And  leve  the  hilles  hee,3  >> 

And  shadow  hem  in  the  leves  grene, 

Under  the  grenewood  tre. 

The  ballad  has  a  well-constructed  plot,  with  fighting, 
imprisonment,  disguise,  and  escape. 

In  prose  the  fifteenth  century  produced  one  work  which 
has  much  of  the  elevation  and  imaginative  splendor  of 
great  poetry,  the  M orte  Darthur  of  Sir  Thomas 
Fifteenth-  Malory.  Malory  was  a  knight,  a  gentleman 
Prose.  of  an  ancient  house,  with  its  seat  at  Newbold 

Revell,  Warwickshire.  As  a  young  man  he 
served  in  France,  in  the  military  retinue  of  Richard 
Beaucharnp,  Earl  of  Warwick,  a  warrior  in  whom  lived 
again  the  knightly  ideal  of  a  former  age,  and  who  was 
known  by  the  romantic  title  of  "Father  of  Courtesy." 
Such  a  lineage  and  training  fitted  Malory  peculiarly  for 
his  task  of  combining  in  one  great  prose  mosaic  almost 
all  the  legends  and  tales  of  King  Arthur  and  his  knights 
of  the  Round  Table,  which  had  been  richly  elaborated  by 
the  poets  and  prose-writers  of  England  and  France. 
Here,  in  an  enchanted  realm,  detached  from  actuality,  we 
hear  of  the  high  deeds  of  love,  loyalty,  and  revenge  per- 
formed by  the  great  personifications  of  chivalry — Gawain, 
Lancelot,  Percival,  and  Galahad.  Very  largely  by  virtue 
of  his  imitating  the  style  of  his  French  originals,  Malory 
became  the  master  of  a  simple,  flowing  English,  primitive 
in  structure,  but  capable  of  considerable  flexibility  and 
falling  into  pleasant  natural  rhythms.  Almost  the  only 
English  example  which  he  might  have  had  was  in  the 
famous  Travels  of  Sir  John  Mandeville,  a  clever  and  long- 
accepted  literary  forgery,  really  compiled  from  numerous 
accounts  of  travels;  it  was  originally  composed  in  French, 

Pleasant.  *  Little  birds.  'High. 


THE   AGE    OF    CHAUCER  69 

and  was  translated  into  English  late  in  the  fourteenth 
century.  The  translator  of  these  fictitious  Travels  is 
unknown,  but  whoever  he  was,  he  threw  his  marvellous 
tales  of  giant  sheep,  human  beings  with  dogs'  faces, 
"anthropophagi,  and  men  whose  heads  do  grow  beneath 
their  shoulders."  into  a  simple,  lucid  prose,  which,  while 
lacking  the  terseness  and  energy  of  Wyclif's  popular  ser- 
mons, was  the  best  instrument  yet  found  for  the  journey- 
work  of  literature.  This  instrument  Malory  took  up; 
but  in  response  to  the  superior  dignity  and  beauty  of 
his  subject,  he  raised  it  to  a  higher  power.  The  Morte 
Darthur  was  finished  by  1470;  it  was  printed  in  1485, 
when  Caxton,  the  first  English  printer,  published  it  with 
an  interesting  preface  from  his  own  hand. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  RENAISSANCE:  NON-DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  TO  THE 
DEATH  OF  SPENSER 

THE  literary  decline  following  the  death  of  Chaucer 

was  due  partly  to  political  causes.     The  dispute  in  regard 

to  the  throne,  which  culminated  in  the  Wars 

Period  of         of  j-ne  Roses,  distracted  the  country,  wasted 

Decline  after      .  .      _       „          .  ,     .        . 

Chaucer.  its  energy,  and  finally  destroyed  in  large 
measure  the  noble  families  on  whose  patron- 
age early  literature  and  art  were  dependent.  The  acces- 
sion of  Henry  VII  in  1485  brought  about  a  period  of 
quiet  and  recovery.  As  its  power  increased,  the  country 
resumed  its  position  in  the  family  of  European  nations, 
and  began  through  them  to  feel  anew  the  stimulus  of  the 
movement  called  the  Renaissance. 

The  Renaissance  was  in  essence  an  intellectual  rebirth. 
It  showed  itself  in  the  effort  of  the  individual  to  free  him- 
self from  the  rigid  institutions  of  the  Middle 
Renaissance.  Ages,  feudalism  and  the  church;  and  to 
assert  his  right  to  live,  to  think,  and  to  ex- 
press himself  as  he  pleased.  As  men  gained  this  freedom 
they  felt  less  inclined  to  assent  to  the  mediaeval  view  that 
this  life  should  be  sacrificed  to  the  future;  they  turned 
more  and  more  to  the  present  world,  to  the  problems  of 
gaining  mastery  in  it  through  wealth  or  statecraft,  of 
discovering  its  secrets  through  exploration  and  scientific 
experiment,  of  heightening  its  enjoyments  through  art 
and  literature. 

One  force  of  immense  importance  in  the  Renaissance 
was  the  new  knowledge  of  the  world  of  antiquity,  which 
was   obtained  through  the  recovery  of  the  writings  and 
70 


THE   RENAISSANCE  71 

works  of  art  of  the    classical    period.     The    idea   pre- 
sented in   the  literatures  of  Athens  and  Rome,  of  life 
which  should  be  lived  for  its  opportunities  of 
individual  development  and  enjoyment,  came     The 

.    _  J    J  Influence  of 

to  have  a  strong  influence  on  men — an  the  Classics, 
influence  denoted  by  the  term  Humanism, 
which  was  applied  to  the  study  of  the  classics.  More- 
over, the  examples  of  perfection  of  form  given  by  classi- 
cal poets,  orators,  sculptors,  and  architects,  became 
models  on  which  the  new  taste  for  the  beautiful  formed 
itself.  Naturally,  Italy,  as  a  seat  of  Roman  civilization, 
possessed  within  herself  a  great  store  of  the  relics  of  the 
classical  age,  and  was  in  the  best  position  to  receive  more 
from  the  East.  When  the  Turks  conquered  the  Eastern 
7,  Empire  and  captured  Constantinople,  in  1453,  many 
Greek  scholars  betook  themselves  to  Italy  with  their 
manuscripts;  and  in  this  way  Italian  cities  became  cen- 
tres of  Greek  study,  and  of  the  classical  culture  or  hu- 
manism in  which  the  new  intellectual  impulse  was  nour- 
ished. 

With  all  these  advantages  Italy  became  the  teacher  of 
Europe  in  philosophy,  in  art,  and  in  classical  scholarship. 
Other  nations,  however,  supplied  elements  of 
the  new  world  which  was  being  created.  Elements  in 
Spain  and  Portugal  gave  the  practical  energy  Renaissance, 
that  sent  Columbus  to  America  and  Vasco  da 
Gama  around  Africa.  Germany  contributed  the  inven- 
tion of  printing,  by  which  the  new  civilization  was  dif- 
fused among  the  people;  and  Germany  also  took  the  lead 
ia  the  movement  which  had  for  its  object  the  emancipa- 
tion of  the  conscience  from  the  church.  A  beginning 
had  been  made  in  this  direction  by  Wyclif ;  but  the  great 
forward  step  was  taken  when,  in  1517,  Luther  nailed  to 
the  church  door  in  Wittenberg  his  attack  upon  the  power 
of  the  Pope.  It  is  true,  this  Reformation,  as  time  went 
on,  took  the  form  of  a  moral  reaction  against  the  worldly 


72  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

spirit  of  the  Renaissance;  but  in  its  largest  aspect  it  made 
not  only  for  the  religious  liberty  of  the  individual,  but 
also  for  general  freedom  of  thought. 

In  the  early  Renaissance  we  must  think  of  England  as 
lagging  somewhat  behind  the  more  precocious  nations, 

Italy  and  France.     The  English  Renaissance 

can  scarcely  be  said  to  begin  until  the  reign 
inCSand.  of  Henry  VII,  and  it  did  not  come  to  its  full 

splendor  until  the  latter  days  of  Elizabeth. 
Even  before  the  accession  of  Henry  VII,  however,  we  can 
discern  signs  of  its  coming.  In  1476  Caxton  set  up  his 
printing-press  in  London.  Before  this  date  one  of  the 
colleges  at  Oxford  had  engaged  an  Italian  teacher  of 
Greek,  and  in  the  next  few  years  William  Grocyn  and 
Thomas  Linacre  went  to  Italy  to  study  with  the  Italian 
humanists.  They  returned  to  give  Oxford  an  interna- 
tional reputation  as  the  home  of  Greek  studies,  so  that 
the  greatest  scholar  of  the  time,  the  Dutch  Erasmus, 
came  there  to  study,  thinking  it  no  longer  necessary  for 
young  men  to  resort  to  Italy. 

These  men  of  the  new  learning,  especially  the  younger 
generation,   Erasmus   and  his  friends,   John   Colet  and 

Thomas  More,  exemplify  in  memorable 
Reformers!*  fashion  the  hopefulness  and  ideaKsm  that 

attended  the  early  progress  of  the  Renais- 
sance. All  three  were  reformers.  Colet,  who  was  after- 
ward Dean  of  St.  Paul's,  set  a  model  for  the  public-school 
system  of  England,  in  his  famous  St.  Paul's  School. 
Erasmus  sketched  the  character  of  the  perfect  ruler  in 
his  Institutes  of  a  Christian  Prince;  and  More  that  of  a 
perfect  society  in  his  Utopia.  All  three  were  interested 
in  the  reform  of  the  church,  and  though  they  did  not 
follow  Henry  VIII  in  his  revolt  against  the  Pope,  they 
prepared  the  way  for  the  later  alliance  between  the  uni- 
versities and  the  English  Reformation. 
"Still  more  important  than  the  universities  as  a  centre 


THE   RENAISSANCE  73 

of  Renaissance  influence  was  the  court.  Both  Henry 
VII  and  Henry  VIII  ruled  in  the  spirit  of  modern  state- 
craft. Both  encouraged  trade  and  manufac- 
tures, and  increased  the  wealth  of  the  coun- 
try.  Both  set  aside  the  relics  of  feudalism 
by  allowing  men  of  low  birth  to  rise  to  distinction,  through 
personal  service  rendered  to  the  sovereign.  Thus  the 
court  became  the  field  for  the  display  of  individual  am- 
bition. Henry  VIII,  indeed,  in  his  own  character  resem- 
bled strongly  some  of  the  Italian  princes  of  the  Renais- 
sance, who  mingled  the  enlightenment  of  the  statesman 
with  the  suspicious  cruelty  of  the  despot.  The  men  who 
played  for  power  in  his  service  had  need  of  the  utmost 
address,  in  a  game  where  the  stakes  were  the  highest, 
and  defeat  was  fatal.  The  career  of  his  great  minister, 
Cardinal  Wolsey,  is  a  vivid  illustration  of  the  effect  of 
the  Renaissance  in  England.  Of  low  birth,  he  rose  to  be 
the  supreme  figure  in  church  and  state.  In  diplomacy 
he  played  the  game  that  was  taught  by  the  Italian  states, 
his  object  being  to  secure  for  England  the  position  of 
arbiter  in  the  European  balance  of  power.  His  policy 
tended  to  draw  England  nearer  to  the  continental  na- 
tions, and  to  give  her  a  part  in  the  new  civilization.  He 
seconded  her  sovereign's  taste  for  art,  learning,  and  mag- 
nificence. He  founded  Cardinal's  College,  now  Christ 
Church,  at  Oxford,  and  built  Hampton  Court  Palace,  one 
of  the  best  specimens  of  Tudor  architecture.  At  his 
invitation  the  German  painter  Hans  Holbein  came  to 
England  and  painted  for  us  the  faces  and  characters  of 
the  men  of  Henry's  court,  as  Italian  painters  were  doing 
of  Florentines  and  Venetians.  The  whole  court  took  on 
an  aspect  of  splendor  in  dress,  entertainments,  and 
manners. 

The  most  attractive  figure,  both  among  the  Oxford 
reformers  and  later  at  the  court  of  Henry,  is  Sir  Thomas 
More  (1478-1535).  More  separated  from  his  early  com- 


74  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

panions  and  threw  himself  into  state  affairs,  becoming 
Lord   Chancellor  in  succession  to  Wolsey,  and  like  him 

falling  a  victim  to  the  king's  change  of  policy, 
More  °r  he  was  beheaded  in  1535.  He  is  remembered, 

however,  for  the  union  of  his  interests,  in- 
tellectual and  practical,  which  resulted  in  Utopia,  written 
in  Latin  in  1516,  and  translated  into  English  in  1533. 

In  this  famous  book  a  sailor  returning  to  England 
holds  a  conversation  with  the  author  concerning  the 
"  uto  ia."  s£ate  °f  tne  realm,  in  the  course  of  which  it 

appears  that  many  of  the  evils  of  govern- 
ment and  wrongs  of  the  people,  of  which  Langland  had 
complained,  were  still  in  existence.  Then,  in  the  second 
part,  the  sailor  proceeds  to  give  an  account  of  a  land 
beyond  the  sea,  Utopia  (Nowhere),  where  the  people  live 
by  reason,  and  all  poverty  and  injustice  have  been  abol- 
ished. This  sketch  of  an  imaginary  commonwealth  owes 
much  to  Plato's  Republic,  and  in  turn  became  the  ances- 
tor of  a  whole  class  of  fiction,  of  which  Bacon's  New 
Atlantis  is  an  early  and  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells's  Modern  Utopia 
a  recent  example. 

More's  Utopia  represents  the  Renaissance  interest  in 
the  state  as  a  work  of  art,  and  its  enthusiastic  belief 

that  not  only  human  society  but  human  na- 
"  The  Boke  ^ure  itself  is  capable  of  enormous  improve- 

named  the  111,.,.  . 

Govemour."  ment.  Many  other  books  of  the  time  picture 
the  individual  life  as  a  work  of  art,  and 
emphasize  the  resulting  gain  to  society.  Such  books  are 
manuals  of  education,  of  manners,  of  personal  ethics. 
One  of  the  most  important  came  to  England  from  Italy, 
The  Courtier  (1528)  by  Baldassare  Castiglione,  a  book 
which  marks  the  evol'ution  of  the  mediaeval  knight  into 
the  modern  gentleman.  The  Boke  named  the  Governour 
(1531),  by  Sir  Thomas  Elyot,  was  written  to  show  how 
the  culture  of  the  individual  should  serve  the  state,  its 
subject  being  the  proper  education  of  "the  childe  of  a 


THE    RENAISSANCE  75 

gentleman  which  is  to  have  authority  in  a  publike  weale." 
It  is  largely  concerned  with  the  methods  and  benefits  of 
study  of  the  classics,  but  its  English  quality  is  seen  in 
the  author's  enthusiasm  for  outdoor  sports.  "Wras- 
tlynge,"  he  naively  tells  us,  "is  a  very  good  exercise  .  .  . 
so  that  it  be  with  one  that  is  equal  in  strength  or  some- 
what under,  and  that  the  place  be  softe  so  that  in  fallinge 
theyr  bodies  be  not  bruised."  Bowling,  however,  "is  to 
be  utterly  abjected  of  all  noble  men,  in  likewise  foote 
balle,  wherein  is  nothinge  but  beastly  furie  and  extreme 
violence." 

Both  More  and  Elyot  are  to  be  regarded  as  writers  for 
the  aristocracy.  Popular  literature  gathered  about  the 
chief  movement  of  the  time  among  the 
people,  the  Reformation.  The  struggle  for 
the  emancipation  of  conscience  from  priestly 
control  had  begun  in  England  nearly  two  centuries  be- 
fore, with  Wyclif;  and  in  spite  of  persecution  the  spirit 
of  the  Lollards  had  survived  until  the  reign  'of  Henry 
VIII.  This  spirit,  strengthened  by  the  example  of  the 
German  and  Swiss  reformers,  supplied  the  moral  force 
which  made  Henry's  political  separation  from  Rome  in 
1534,  on  account  of  his  first  divorce,  an  opportunity  for  a 
real  reformation.  This  force  went  out  through  the  coun- 
try in  the  sermons  of  Hugh  Latimer,  the  boldest  among 
Henry's  reforming  bishops,  and  the  most  powerful 
preacher  of  the  day.  He  was  of  peasant  birth;  and  his 
writings  represent  a  development  of  popular  English 
prose,  straightforward,  racy,  simple  as  homespun. 

The  Reformation,  and  the  controversies,  religious  and 
political,  which  grew  out  of  it  gave  occasion  for  what  we 
should  call  journalism,  in  the  form  of  pam- 
phlets,  serious   and   satirical,   both  in  prose    The  E*&sh 

i  T      r         .  i       i       i  .         Bible  and 

and  verse.     It  furnished  also  what  came  m    Prayer  Book. 

course   of   time   to  be  one  of   the  strongest 

influences  on  the  development  of  English  style,  in  the 


76  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

translation  of  the  Bible  by  William  Tyndale  and  Miles 
Coverdale  (1526-1538),  of  which  the  popular  character 
is  shown  by  the  fact  that  97  per  cent  of  the  words  are 
Anglo-Saxon.  A  union  between  the  Latin-English  style 
of  the  educated  classes  and  the  simple  every-day  speech 
of  the  people  is  shown  by  another  literary  monument  of 
the  Reformation,  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  prepared 
under  the  direction  of  Cranmer,  the  Archbishop  of  Can- 
terbury under  Henry  VIII  and  Edward  VI.  Here  the 
sonorous  Latin  words,  full  of  suggestion  for  the  lover  of 
the  classics,  are  often  followed  by  their  Anglo-Saxon 
equivalents,  the  sentences  falling  with  a  rhythm  which 
is  in  part  caught  from  Hebrew  poetry,  in  part,  perhaps, 
from  the  artificial  style  which  foreign  models  had  intro- 
duced into  England. 

While  English  prose  was  thus  developing  to  express  the 
ideas  of  the  time  on  the  two  important  subjects,  culture 
and  religion,  poetry  was  also  taking  its  mod- 

em  form-     Tne  last  Poet  of  tne  old  sch°o1  of 
imitators  of  Chaucer  was  John  Skelton  (1460- 

1529).  Toward  the  close  of  his  life,  however,  he  broke 
away  from  the  tradition  of  his  youth,  and  adopted  a 
rough,  short  metre,  adapted  to  the  energy  of  his  satire, 
which  sounded  the  popular  cry  against  abuses  in  church 
and  state.  In  his  harshness  and  meagreness  he  affords 
a  striking  contrast  to  two  poets  of  the  close  of  Henry's 
reign,  who  relieved  the  poverty  of  English  verse  with 
forms  imported  from  Italy,  and  thus  began  modern  Eng- 
lish poetry — Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  (1503-1542)  and  Henry 
Howard,  Earl  of  Surrey  (1517-1547). 

The  career  of  the  former  illustrates  particularly  the 
value  to  English  literature  of  the  close  connection  with 
foreign  countries,  which  Henry  VIII's  ambi- 
ti°n  to  take  Part  in  European  affairs  did  so 
much  to  restore.  Wyatt  was  frequently 
abroad  on  diplomatic  missions;  like  Chaucer  he  visited 


THE    RENAISSANCE  77 

Italy  and  also  Spain  and  France.  His  poems  are,  for 
the  most  part,  translations  and  imitations,  both  -of 
Italian  poetry,  especially  the  love-  sonnet,  and  of  more 
serious  and  didactic  Latin  poems,  such  as  satires  and 
epistles. 

The  love-sonnet,  in  its  origin,  was  the  literary  equiva- 
lent of  that  chivalry  which  led  the  knight  of  the  Middle 
Age  to  show  his  devotion  to  his  lady  by  fight- 
ing in  field  or  in  tournament  for  her  protec- 


tion  and  honor.  The  great  examples  of  this 
chivalric  love  in  poetic  form  had  been  given  by  Dante 
(1265-1321)  in  celebration  of  Beatrice,  and  Petrarch 
(1304-1374)  in  praise  of  Laura.  By  the  latter  the  sonnet 
was  established  as  a  strict  form,  a  poem  in  two  parts,  one 
of  eight  lines  (the  octave)  rhyming  abb  a  abb  a,  and  the 
other  of  six  (the  sestet)  in  which  several  rhyme  schemes 
were  permitted.  With  Petrarch's  imitators  the  sonnet 
had  become  a  literary  exercise,  devoted  to  the  expression 
of  a  love  which  might  be  entirely  imaginary,  or  directed 
toward  an  imaginary  person.  Wyatt's  sonnets,  there- 
fore, like  those  of  his  Italian  masters,  need  not  be  regard- 
ed as  having  strict  biographical  truth,  though  attempts 
have  been  made  to  find  in  them  the  history  of  a  personal 
relation,  and  some  have  guessed  that  they  were  in  part 
inspired  by  Henry's  second  queen,  Anne  Boleyn.  At  all 
events  Wyatt's  poetry  suggests  that  even  a  conventional 
form  was  for  him  the  means  for  a  sincere  expression  of 
feeling;  even  his  translations  seem  charged  with  his  own 
temperament,  and  his  rendering  of  the  Penitential  Psalms 
is  touched  with  personal  religious  emotion.  Wyatt's 
effort  to  achieve  the  regularity  and  finish  of  his  Italian 
models  was  not  always  successful;  he  makes  bad  rhymes, 
he  fails  to  harmonize  word  and  verse  accent,  he  stumbles 
in  scansion.  Yet  such  poems  as  "  Awake  my  lute" 
and  "Forget  not  yet"  are  eminent  examples  of  lyrical 
power. 


78  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Wyatt's  companion  poet,  Surrey,  born  in  1517  and 
beheaded  in  1547,  was  younger  than  his  master  both  in 
years  and  in  spirit.  In  contrast  to  Wyatt's 
gravity  he  has  all  the  exuberance  of  the  age, 
a  perpetual  charm  of  youth  and  promise,  as 
his  brilliant  figure  passes  through  the  sunlight  and  shadow 
of  Henry's  court,  moving  gracefully  and  carelessly  to  the 
scaffold  which  awaited  him.  Like  Wyatt  he  imitated  the 
Italian  amorous  poets;  but  more  significant  than  his  love- 
poems  are  those  of  friendship,  the  sonnets  to  Clere  and 
to  Wyatt,  and  the  elegy  on  the  Duke  of  Richmond,  which 
are  full  of  feeling,  intimate,  personal,  sincere.  Often,  as, 
for  example,  in  the  youthful  poem  which  begins  "The 
soote  season,"  he  shows  an  interest  in  nature,  and  an 
eye  for  details  of  country  life  which  remind  us  of  Milton's 
U  Allegro. 

Surrey,  like  Wyatt,  rendered  his  chief  service  to  Eng- 
lish literature  by  enriching  it  with  foreign  forms.  He 
was  the  first  English  poet  to  use  blank  verse, 
Poetry!8  in  ms  translation  of  two  books  of  the  JEneid. 
Blank  verse  had  been  used  in  Italy  a  few 
years  before  in  a  translation  of  the  same  work,  so  that 
Surrey  did  not  originate  the  form;  but  the  happy  skill 
with  which  he  adopted  it,  and  thus  discovered  to  English 
poetry  its  most  powerful  and  characteristic  verse  form, 
is  worthy  of  all  praise.  He  also  adapted  the  sonnet  to 
English  use,  making  it  a  poem  of  three  quatrains  fol- 
lowed by  a  couplet,  a  form  rendered  immortal  by  Shake- 
speare. 

Besides  Wyatt  and  Surrey  there  were  many  courtiers 
of  Henry  VIII  who  used  poetry  as  a  sort  of  social  ac- 
complishment.    Such  verse  was  intended  for 
Mis°c"£ny."     private  circulation  in  manuscript  form.     By 
the  middle  of  the  century,  however,  there  had 
grown  up  a  demand  on  the  part  of  the  reading  public 
which  publishers  attempted   to  supply  by  volumes  of 


THE   RENAISSANCE  79 

miscellaneous  verse.  The  first  of  these  collections,  Tot- 
tel's  Miscellany,  which  contained  the  poems  of  Wyatt, 
Surrey,  and  several  of  their  followers,  appeared  in  1557, 
a  date  which  marks  the  public  beginning  of  modern 
English  poetry. 

The  influence  of  Wyatt  and  Surrey  is  shown  in  the 
work  of  Thomas  Sackville,  afterward  Lord  Buckhurst 
(1536-1608),  contributed  to  a  volume  called 
The  Mirror  for  Magistrates  (1559).  This  book 
in  general  character  looks  back  to  an  older 
fashion,  being  a  collection  of  stories  of  persons  who  from 
their  high  place  fell  into  tragic  misfortune  (it  was,  in 
fact,  a  continuation  of  a  work  of  Lydgate  called  The  Falls 
of  Princes),  but  Sackville's  "Induction"  and  "The  Com- 
plaint of  the  Duke  of  Buckingham"  are  good  modern 
poetry.  He  also  wrote,  in  collaboration  with  Thomas 
Norton,  the  first  regular  English  tragedy,  Gorboduc  (see 
page  113).  Both  in  his  contributions  to  The  Mirror, 
which  are  in  Chaucer's  seven-line  stanza,  and  in  Gor- 
boduc, which  is  in  blank  verse,  Sackville  shows  surprising 
mastery  of  his  form.  He  has  a  sureness  of  touch  and  a 
freedom  from  technical  errors  which  put  him  beyond 
Surrey  and  Wyatt;  and  his  imaginative  energy  is  sugges- 
tive of  the  great  poets  who  were  to  follow. 

The  same  sure  advance  in  technical  mastery  is  shown 
by  George  Gascoigne  (1535-1577).  He,  like  Wyatt  and 
Surrey,  drew  largely  on  foreign  sources.  His 
comedy,  The  Supposes,  came  from  the  Latin  Gascofgne. 
(through  the  Italian  form  of  Ariosto)  and  his 
tragedy,  Jocasta,  from  the  Greek.  His  Steele  Glas  was  an 
original  satire  in  verse,  but  highly  imitative.  Against 
this  product  of  imitation  must  be  set  his  native  verse, 
especially  the  "Lullaby  of  a  Lover,"  which  has  all  the 
lyrical  and  spiritual  quality  of  Elizabethan  song.  It  is 
noteworthy  of  his  technical  skill  that  he  prepared  a  little 
treatise  on  versification,  a  text-book  for  other  poets  to 


•&D  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

follow,  called  "Notes  of  Instruction  for  the  Writing  of 
English  Verse." 

Except  for  the  poets  mentioned,  however,  it  is  a  mat- 
ter of  remark  that  English  literature  through  the  reign 
of  Henry  VIII  and  the  early  part  of  the  reign  of  Eliza- 
beth, gives  little  promise  of  the  outburst  which  was  to 
mark  the  closing  years  of  the  century.  That  outburst 
was  the  result  of  a  sudden,  overwhelming  enthusiasm  in 
which  the  whole  nation  shared.  After  the  uncertain  con- 
flict between  the  two  religious  parties  which  filled  the 
reigns  of  Edward  VI  (1547-1553)  and  Mary  (1553-1558), 
when  it  seemed  as  if  the  country  would  be  plunged  again 
into  civil  war,  the  accession  of  Elizabeth  brought  back 
the  unity  and  prosperity  which  England  had  enjoyed 
under  the  early  Tudors. 

The  force  of  the  Renaissance,  which  had  been  checked 
for  a  time  by  national  hesitation,  manifested  itself  anew 
and  more  widely.  Many  things  combined  to 
EUzabeth°  &ve  distinction  to  personal  character,  and 
variety  and  color  to  life.  The  enlarged  pos- 
sibilities of  the  world,  the  new  lands  beyond  the  sea, 
offered  unlimited  opportunity  for  action.  The  diffusion 
of  knowledge  of  the  past,  together  with  the  freedom  of 
thought  which  the  Reformation  had  brought  about, 
afforded  opportunities  as  tempting  for  speculative  enter- 
prise and  imaginative  adventure.  Altogether  there  ap- 
peared to  men  a  new,  wider,  richer  world;  and  with  it 
came  a  clearer  consciousness  of  the  individual  personality 
which  that  world  seemed  made  to  satisfy.  This  discov- 
ery of  the  new  world  and  of  man,  as  it  has  been  called, 
coming  to  the  nation  in  the  time  of  joyful  reaction  from 
the  uncertainty  and  peril  of  Mary's  reign,  set  the  whole 
mass  into  vibration;  but  the  tendencies  which  made  for 
purely  personal  and  selfish  advancement  were  both  di- 
rected and  kept  in  check  by  the  growth  of  national  feel- 
ing. Elizabeth's  reign  united  the  nation,  and  her  per- 


THE   RENAISSANCE  8 1 

sonal  presence  gave  it  a  visible  sign  of  unity.  Under  her 
rule  England  passed  through  an  experience  as  dramatic 
as  that  of  Athens  at  Marathon;  after  a  long  period  of  sus- 
pense the  strain  was  relieved  by  the  wonderful  repulse 
of  the 'Spanish  Armada  in  1588.  The  patriotism,  made 
so  intense  by  danger  and  victory,  shines  through  the  lit- 
erature of  the  time.  The  eager,  instinctive  response  of 
the  people  found  utterance  in  the  choruses  of  Shake- 
speare's Henry  V.  The  more  conscious  political  virtue, 
which  touched  with  something  of  high  purpose  the  lives 
of  Sidney,  of  Sackville,  even  of  Essex  and  Raleigh,  is 
reflected  in  Spenser's  Faerie  Queene. 

It  is  easy  to  see  how  this  spirit  of  the  time  finds  expres- 
sion in  the  drama  and  in  lyric  poetry — the  more  sponta- 
neous and  native  types  of  Elizabethan  litera- 
ture. It  is  not  so  easy,  but  it  is  still  interest-  Literature*0 
ing,  to  see  it  working  itself  out  in  the  more 
conscious  and  artificial  forms.  The  patriotism  which  re- 
pulsed the  Armada  made  men  seek  to  create  a  literature 
in  keeping  with  England's  national  greatness.  It  turned 
their  attention  first  of  all  to  their  language.  Some  held 
that  English  should  be  purified  from  words  of  foreign  ex- 
traction; others  that  it  should  be  enriched  by  coinages 
from  the  Latin  and  Greek.  Questions  of  the  structure  and 
decoration  of  prose  style  brought  into  being  a  literature 
of  rhetorical  criticism.  It  was  felt  that  the  highest  func-. 
tion  of  literature  was  to  teach,  and  accordingly,  to  replace 
the  romances  and  ballads  which  circulated  among  the 
people,  authors  sought  to  give  serious  employment  to  the 
printing-presses  by  providing  them  with  works  of  in- 
struction in  all  departments  of  knowledge.  The  poets 
seem  instinctively  to  have  felt  the  greatness  of  the  future 
of  English  poetry,  and  to  have  taken  conscious  pride  in 
their  contribution  to  it.  Like  the  prose  writers,  they 
were  perplexed  by  many  questions  and  theories.  They 
suffered  from  the  conception  that  dignified  literature  must 


b2  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

be  didactic,  and  hence  produced  vastly  long  treatises  on 
history,  geography,  and  philosophy,  which  might  better 
have  been  written  in  prose.  They  hesitated  in  the  choice 
among  foreign  forms,  and  were  troubled  by  the  fact  that 
classical  poets  did  not  use  rhyme.  But  in  all  this  writing, 
so  much  of  which  seems  to  us  artificial  and  unvital,  there 
is  the  impulse  of  adventure  and  experiment,  the  faith  in 
learning  and  culture,  and  the  pride  in  national  achieve- 
ment which  characterize  the  Elizabethan  age  alike  in 
exploration,  in  trade,  in  social  life,  and  in  war. 

The  first  works  which  should  be  mentioned  in  the  Eliz- 
abethan period  are  those  collections  of  material  which 

served  as  mines  whence  the  crude  ore  was 
Histories!"1  taken  which  was  afterward  smelted  into 

purer  literary  form  of  poetry  and  drama. 
Such  was  the  collection  of  novelle,  or  short  stories,  mainly 
from  Boccaccio  and  other  Italian  writers,  made  by  Wil- 
liam Painter  in  his  Palace  of  Pleasure  (1566).  Such  sto- 
ries were  immensely  popular  and  furnished  the  plots  of 
many  of  the  stories  of  Greene  and  plays  of  Shakespeare. 
Another  collection,  Tragicall  Discourses  (1567)  by  Geof- 
frey Fen  ton,  was  drawn  in  the  main  from  a  later  Italian 
novelist,  Bandello.  Bandello's  stories  were  chiefly  of  the 
horrors  of  the  later  Renaissance;  they  were  used  exten- 
sively by  dramatists  after  Shakespeare,  led  by  the  public 
.demand  for  sensation  to  provide  plays  of  lust  and  blood. 
I  But  England  had  a  book  of  tragedies  of  its  own — the 
Acts  and  Monuments  (1563),  commonly  called  the  "Book 
of  Martyrs"  of  John  Foxe,  to  which  we  owe  those  pic- 
turesque tales  of  the  men  and  women  who  suffered  mar- 
tyrdom for  their  faith  under  Queen  Mary.  This  book 
became  the  text-book  of  the  Reformation,  and  to  its 
heroic  examples  of  constancy,  as  much  as  to  any  one 
influence,  is  due  the  severe,  strenuous  temper  of  the 
English  religious  mind  later  seen  in  Puritanism.  Another 
work  of  English  history  to  which  later  poets  and  drama- 


THE    RENAISSANCE  83 

tists,  including  Shakespeare,  were  much  indebted  was 
the  Chronyde  (1578)  of  England,  Scotland,  and  Ireland, 
by  Raphael  Holinshed.  For  Roman  history  they  resorted 
to  the  translation  of  Plutarch's  Lives  (1579)  by  Sir  Thomas 
North.  And  in  this  connection  may  be  mentioned  Rich- 
ard Hakluyt's  Principall  Navigations,  Voidges  and  Dis- 
coveries of  the  English  Nation  ( 1 589) . 

The  first  concern  of  the  Renaissance,  it  has  been  said, 
was  with  the  individual— to  enable  him  to  realize  the 
possibilities  of  life  through  training.  It  was  the  peculiar 
strength  of  the  English  Renaissance  that  this  attitude 
was  modified  by  the  ideal  of  service  to  the  state.  This  is 
well  exemplified  in  the  work  of  Roger  Ascham  (1515-1568), 
a  famous  scholar  of  the  time  and  the  tutor  of  the  Princess 
Elizabeth.  Of  his  two  essays,  the  first,  called  Toxophilus, 
(1545)  was  ostensibly  written  in  praise  of  archery;  but  it 
is  really  a  defense  of  a  sound,  well-balanced  life,  with  due 
attention  to  field-sports,  of  which  Elyot  had  called  "the 
shotyng  in  a  longe  bowe"  the  chief. 

The  second,  The  Schoolmaster  (1570),  sets  forth  the 
idea  of  education  as  a  humanizing  process  in  which  the 
pupil  must  work  with  the  teacher.  Ascham 
was  a  scholar,  and  in  his  style  as  in  his  sub-  Aschlm. 
stance  he  marks  the  reverence  for  classical 
authority  which  followed  the  revival  of  learning.  His 
purpose  obliged  him  to  choose  English  and  to  write  sim- 
ply, but  he  declares  that  it  would  have  been  easier  for 
him  to  write  in  Latin.  -His  view  of  life,  however,  is  thor- 
oughly English;  he  praises  learning  not  for  its  own  sake, 
but  because  it  furnishes  discipline  for  character  and  ex- 
amples for  conduct.  For  him  the  aim  of  life  is  social  use- 
fulness; the  private  virtues  and  the  service  of  the  individ- 
ual to  the  state  go  hand  in  hand.  "In  very  deed,"  he 
says,  "the  good  or  ill  bringing  up  of  children  doth  as 
much  serve  to  the  good  or  ill  service  of  God,  our  Prince, 
and  our  whole  countrie,  as  any  one  thing  beside."  As  a 


84  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Latinist  and  an  Englishman  he  resented  the  strong  influ- 
ence of  things  Italian.  He  praises  The  Courtier  of  Cas- 
tiglione  (see  page  74),  which  had  been  translated  into 
English  by  Sir  Thomas  Hoby  (1551),  but  he  attacks  such 
collections  of  Italian  stories  as  those  found  in  the  Palace 
of  Pleasure,  "whereby  many  young  willes  and  wittes, 
allured  to  wantonnes,  do  now  boldly  contemne  all  severe 
bookes  that  sounde  to  honestie  and  Godlines."  Particu- 
larly he  reprobates  the  practice  among  Englishmen  of  re- 
sorting to  Italy  for  study  or  travel,  and  quotes  an  Italian 
proverb,  "Englese  Italianato  e  un  diabolo  incarnato,"  or 
"an  Italianate  Englishman  is  a  devil  incarnate." 

A  more  striking  example  of  the  literature  of  behavior 
is  furnished  by  John  Lyly  (1553-1606).  Lyly  was  edu- 
T  hn  L  i  cated  at  Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  where  he 
seems  to  have  gained  the  reputation  of  being 
a  trifler — "the  fiddlestick  of  Oxford,"  an  enemy  called 
him.  His  superficial  cleverness,  however,  enabled  him  to 
write  a  successful  account  of  the  culture  of  the  period,  in 
Euphues  or  the  Anatomy  of  Wit  (1579),  and  its  sequel, 
Euphues  and  His  England  (1580). 

Euphues  is  first  of  all  a  work  of  fiction,  founded  upon 

the  situation,  common  in  mediaeval  story,  of  two  friends 

in  love  with  the  same  girl.     Instead  of  using 

**  Eu.Dhu.es 

this  situation  as  an  opportunity  to  illustrate 
the  chivalric  devotion  of  friendship,  however,  Lyly  allows 
his1  model  Euphues  to  displace  his  friend  in  the  affection 
of  his  lady,  who  then  cynically  accepts  a  third  suitor. 
By  virtue  of  this  plot  Euphues  may  claim  to  be  the  first 
of  English  novels.  More  important  than  the  story,  how- 
ever, is  the  teaching  of  the  book.  The  plot  serves  to  con- 
nect a  series  of  conversations,  letters,  and  essays,  on  such 
subjects  as  love,  social  relations,  education,  religion.  The 
ideal  of  a  thoroughly  and  symmetrically  developed  per- 
sonality is  implicit  in  the  title,  which  means  literally 
''well  shaped  in  growing."  It  is  important  to  note  that 


THE   RENAISSANCE  85 

Lyly  gives  a  place  to  religious  influence  in  moulding 
character.  After  an  impressive  setting  forth  of  the  ad- 
vantages of  worldly  culture  Euphues  exclaims:  "Vaine  is 
Philosophy,  vaine  is  Phisick,  vaine  is  Law,  vaine  is  all 
learning  without  that  taste  of  divine  knowledge." 

In  this  there  may  have  been  a  design  to  court  favor  by 
appealing  to  all  the  interests  of  the  day,  those  of  the 
Renaissance  and  of  the  Reformation  as  well.  The  time- 
liness of  the  book  is  shown  by  its  popularity  and  its 
influence  as  a  manual  of  public  and  social  conduct.  It 
set  both  a  fashion  of  speech  and  a  code  of  manners;  a 
dialect  and  an  etiquette  for  polite  usage.  However  in- 
direct, wasteful,  and  artificial  this  fashion  now  appears, 
it  was  in  its  time  an  evidence  and  a  cause  of  refinement. 
One  of  the  distinguishing  accomplishments  of  the  Renais- 
sance was  the  elevation  of  social  life  into  a  fine  art; 
and  of  this  result  in  England  Euphues  was  the  chief 
sign. 

The  artificial  language  which  Euphues  and  his  friends 
used,  and  which  became  a  literary  fashion,  is  the  charac- 
teristic of  the  book  for  which  it  is  remembered 
to-day.  Among  Lyly's  mannerisms  the  most 
remarkable  is  the  arrangement  of  words  in  antithesis,  the 
contrast  being  marked  by  alliteration,  thus:  "Although 
I  have  shrined  thee  in  my  heart  for  a  trusty  friend,  I  will 
shunne  thee  hereafter  as  a  trothless  foe"  Another  pecu- 
liarity is  his  lavish  use  of  similes  drawn  from  what  passed 
for  natural  history,  as:  "The  milk  of  the  Tygresse,  that 
the  more  salt  there  is  thrown  into  it  the  fresher  it  is." 
Euphuism  was  but  one  form  of  a  widely  diffused  tendency 
in  Renaissance  literature,  an  attempt  to  prove  the  artis- 
tic value  of  prose  by  giving  it  some  of  the  qualities  of 
poetry.  Earlier  writers  than  Lyly,  Ascham  and  Cran- 
mer,  had  shown  traces  of  it;  and  English  prose  did  not 
escape  from  its  influence  until  well  on  in  the  next  cen- 
tury. In  Lyly's  own  generation,  which  was  distinguished 


86  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

for  its  interest  in  all  sorts  of  artistic  experiments,  other 
forms  of  this  tendency  appeared,  notably  that  introduced 
by  the  most  charming  and  the  most  forceful  of  the  lit- 
erary dilettantes  of  the  age,  Sir  Philip  Sidney  (1554— 
1586). 

Philip  Sidney  was  born  in  1554,  of  one  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished families  in  England.  He  was  sent  to  Shrews- 
bury school  and  to  Oxford;  and  then  spent 
Sidney  P  some  time  abroad,  in  Paris,  Vienna,  and 
Italy,  whence  he  returned  to  Elizabeth's 
court.  There  he  represented  the  more  elevated  political 
conceptions  of  the  time.  His  uncle,  the  Earl  of  Leicester, 
was  the  political  chief  of  the  Puritan  party,  which  favored 
committing  England  to  a  definite  alliance  with  the 
Protestant  states  of  Europe;  and  in  furtherance  of  this 
policy  Sidney  was  sent  on  a  mission  to  Germany  in  1577. 
He  was  also  eagerly  interested  in  the  development  of 
English  power  on  the  sea.  In  1583  he  obtained  a  grant  of 
land  in  America,  and  two  years  later  he  made  an  unsuc- 
cessful attempt  to  escape  from  court  and  join  Sir  Francis 
Drake  in  one  of  his  half-piratical  expeditions  against  the 
Spaniards.  This  same  year  he  accompanied  the  English 
army  which  was  sent  to  help  the  Dutch  Protestants 
against  Spain;  and  in  1586  lie  fell  in  a  skirmish  at  Zut- 
phen. 

Sidney's  name,  more  than  any  other,  stands  for  the 
greatness  of  national  and  personal  ideals  which  we  tradi- 
tionally associate  with  the  age  of  Elizabeth. 
^  *s>  therefore,  somewhat  disappointing  to 
find  his  writing  less  eminent  than  his  life. 
It  must  be  remembered,  however,  that  Sidney,  like  most 
men  of  position  of  his  age,  wrote  not  for  the  public  but 
for  himself  and  for  a  few  friends.  His  works  were  pub- 
lished first  in  pirated  editions,  the  Arcadia  in  1590,  and 
Astrophel  and  Stella  in  1591.  The  latter  is  a  collection  of 
songs  and  sonnets,  evidently  addressed  to  one  person, 


THE    RENAISSANCE  87 

Lady  Penelope  Devereux,  afterward  Lady  Rich.  Sidney 
and  Lady  Penelope  had  been  betrothed  when  the  latter 
was  a  child.  For  some  reason  the  match  was  broken  off, 
and  Lady  Penelope  married  Lord  Rich,  with  whom  she 
lived  for  a  while  most  unhappily.  Whether  Sidney  actu- 
ally loved  her  when  it  was  too  late,  or  whether  he  wrote 
love-sonnets  as  a  literary  exercise,  addressing  them  to 
his  old  friend  out  of  compliment  and  sympathy,  it  is  im- 
possible to  say.  On  the  one  hand  there  is  in  his  sonnets 
much  of  the  conventional  material  of  the  Italian  son- 
neteers; but  on  the  other  there  are  touches  so  apt  to  the 
situation  of  a  man  who  loves  too  late,  that  one  hesitates 
to  ascribe  them  to  mere  dramatic  skill.  In  none  of  the 
many  sonnet  cycles  of  the  age,  except  Shakespeare's  and 
Spenser's,  do  we  find  so  much  that  has  the  stamp  of  per- 
sonality upon  it;  surely  in  none  except  these  so  much 
that  has  the  accent  of  great  poetry. 

Sidney's  chief  literary  adventure  was  the  Arcadia, 
which  he  began  in  1580,  when,  in  consequence  of  a  quarrel 
with  the  Earl  of  Oxford,  he  was  in  temporary 
disgrace  and  banishment  from  court.  The  "Arcadia" 
writing  of  the  Arcadia  was  merely  a  summer 
pastime,  undertaken  to  please  the  Countess  of  Pembroke, 
Sidney's  sister.  The  title  of  the  work  was  suggested  by 
romances,  popular  in  Italy  and  in  Spain,  in  which  the 
scenes  are  laid  in  a  pastoral  country  like  the  ancient 
Arcadia.  The  prose  tale  is  interrupted  at  intervals  by 
passages  of  verse,  imitated  from  the  eclogues  of  Virgil 
and  Theocritus,  in  which  the  shepherds  sing  of  love  and 
the  delights  of  rural  life.  This  form  of  literature  had  an 
immense  charm  for  countries  which  were  becoming  a 
little  weary  of  the  activity  of  the  early  Renaissance;  and 
Sidney  himself,  in  his  banishment  from  court,  doubtless 
felt  the  influence  of  this  mood.  It  was,  however,  a  pass- 
ing one,  for  Sidney  adopts  as  the  prevailing  model  of  his 
fiction  the  late  Greek  romances,  which  were  then  being 


88         A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

translated  into  English,  and  which  abound  in  adventures 
of  all  kinds  connected  by  the  most  intricate  plots. 

In  his  attempt  at  enrichment  of  style,  Sidney  worked 
as  consciously  as  Lyly.     He  frequently  uses  the  antithesis 
and  other  mechanical  devices,  but  his  chief 
The  style         resource  is  in  prodigality  of  ornament  and 
"Arcadia."        elaboration    of    figure.      For   example,    one 
character  is  besought  "to  keep  her  speech 
for  a  while  within  the  paradise  of  her  mind."     Undressing 
is  described  as  "getting  the  pure  silver  of  their  bodies  out 
of  the  ore  of  their  garments."     This  boldness  of  metaphor 
is  characteristic  of  the  spirit  of  the  book.     Sidney  writes 
as  if  seeking  adventures  among  words,  with  the  enthusi- 
asm that  he  might  have  thrown  into  a  buccaneering  ex- 
pedition to  the  Indies,  if  fortune  had  been  kind  to  him. 
The  verse  passages  which  divide  the  several  books  of 
the  Arcadia  are  interesting  for  their  attempts  at  imita- 
tion of  various  artificial  Italian  forms.     Sid- 
Sidney's          nev  was  jn  verse  as  in  prose,  an  amateur  and 

Literary  '  '.  *  '  . 

Theories.  an  experimenter.  He  was  interested  in  the 
plan  of  using  Latin  metres  to  the  exclusion 
of  the  rhyming  verse  natural  to  the  English  tongue. 
This  attempt  was  in  line  with  similar  undertakings  in 
France  and  Italy,  and  serves  to  show  how  strong  and 
how  dangerous  an  influence  the  revival  of  learning  exerted 
upon  the  beginnings  of  modern  literature. 

Sidney  subsequently  shook  himself  partly  free  from 
such  artistic  vagaries.     In   1579   Stephen   Gosson  pub- 
lished a  pamphlet  called  The  School  of  Abuse, 
"  ^e  in  which,  as  a  Puritan,  he  attacked  the  art  of 

Poesie."  the  age,  especially  the  drama.  Sidney  replied 
with  his  Defence  of  Poesie  in  1581.  In  this, 
one  of  the  earliest  pieces  of  English  criticism,  Sidney 
showed  his  classicism  by  his  approval  of  plays  built  on 
the  Latin  model;  but  he  defended  English  poetry,  even 
of  the  native-ballad  sort,  exclaiming,  "I  never  heard  the 


THE   RENAISSANCE  89 

old  ,song  of  'Percy  and  Douglas'  that  I  found  not  my 
heart  moved  more  than  with  a  trumpet." 

Sidney's  Arcadia  and  Lyly's  Euphues  were  the  two 
significant  books  of  the  time,  and  they  were  naturally 
the  models  for  authors  who  depended  upon 
the  reading  public.  Apart  from  the  writers 
who  gathered  about  the  court — amateurs  like 
Sidney  or  those  who,  like  Spenser,  looked  for  support  to 
the  patronage  of  the  rich  and  preferment  from  the  Queen 
— there  appeared  in  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  a  group  of 
men  who  lived  directly  on  their  literary  earnings.  These 
latter  were  often  men  of  university  education  who  had 
lost  caste.  As  a  class  they  showed  the  intense  desire  for 
sensual  enjoyment,  the  violence  of  passion,  the  impa- 
tience of  restraint,  social  or  moral,  that  accompanied  the 
assertion  of  individuality  in  the  Renaissance.  The  irreg- 
ularity of  their  lives,  which  ended  often  in  misery  or  dis- 
grace, has  made  them  the  heroes  of  stories  famous  among 
the  tragedies  of  literature.  Marlowe  was  stabbed  to 
death  in  a  tavern  brawl;  Peele  died  of  dissipation;  Greene, 
as  the  story  goes,  from  surfeiting;  and  Nashe,  we  are  told, 
of  starvation. 

Such  men  turned  chiefly  to  the  theatre,  as  the  most 
profitable  market  for  literature;  but  they  have  left  also 
a  large  body  of  miscellaneous  writings,  fiction, 
biography,    pamphlets.     They  were   not   ex-  Greene, 

perimenters  and  innovators,  like  Sidney  and 
his  circle,  but  they  were  quick  to  test  any  literary  theory 
or  form  by  its  adaptability  to  popular  taste.  Robert 
Greene  (1560-1592)  began  his  career  by  imitating  Lyly, 
in  a  number  of  euphuistic  romances.  After  the  Arcadia 
had  begun  to  circulate  in  manuscript,  he  wrote  Menaphon 
(1589),  a  pastoral  tale  in  which  he  clearly  imitated  Sid- 
ney's style.  Instead  of  the  conventional  eclogues,  sung 
on  the  occasion  of  a  rustic  festival  which  interrupts  the 
plot,  he  introduced  songs  as  expressions  of  the  true  feel- 


QO  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ing  of  his -characters  at  appropriate  places  in  the  story, 
just  as  Shakespeare  did  in  his  plays.  Better  known  than 
Menaphon  is  Pandosto  (1588),  a  somewhat  similar  narra- 
tive, on  which  Shakespeare  based  his  Winter's  Tale. 
Greene's  most  individual  work  was  done  in  his  realistic 
accounts  of  the  arts  of  swindlers  in  London,  and  in  the 
partly  autobiographical  narratives,  Greene's  Repentance 
and  Never  Too  Late,  in  which  he  drew  from  his  own 
life  lessons  of  morality,  possibly  with  a  view  to  the  in- 
creasing importance  of  the  Puritan  part  of  the  reading 
public. 

Another  writer  who  for  some  years  belonged  to  the 
crew  of  literary  adventurers  was  Thomas  Lodge  (1558- 
1625).  His  romance,  Rosalynde  (1590),  which 
furnished  the  story  of  As  You  Like  It,  is  the 
most  perfect  bit  of  fiction  of  the  time.  In  his 
subtitle,  Euphues'  Golden  Legacy,  Lodge  recognized  his 
obligations  to  Lyly;  but  his  style  is  far  less  artificial  than 
that  of  his  prototype,  and  the  exquisite  pastoral  setting 
(preserved  by  Shakespeare  in  his  Forest  of  Arden)  is  to 
be  set  down  rather  to  Sidney's  influence.  Lodge,  like 
Greene  and  Nashe,  had  the  lyrical  gift  which  few  writers 
of  the  time  were  wholly  without.  His  highest  fame  is 
as  the  writer  of  the  exquisite  songs  with  which  he  inter- 
spersed his  romances,  such  as  "Love  in  my  Bosom  Like 
a  Bee,"  and  "Like  to  the  Clear  in  Highest  Sphere,"  from 
Rosalynde. 

Thomas  Nashe  (1567-1600)  was  a  journalist  with   a 

keen   weapon   of   satire,   whose  pamphlets   appealed    to 

public  interest  in  serious  questions,  such  as 

Thomas  ...       .  .  ,  .  . 

Nashe  and  the  power  of  the  bishops,  and  in  private  scan- 
Picaresque  dal,  sucn  as  gathered  about  his  friend,  Rob- 
Romance.  °  .  .  .  „  .  , 

ert  Greene.     His  chief  importance  is  due  to 

his  adoption  of  a  new  model  for  fiction.  The  Arcadia 
and  Euphues  are  both  aristocratic,  in  that  they  tend  to 
preserve  the  ideal  of  knightly  virtue  or  to  replace  it  by 


THE   RENAISSANCE  9! 

that  of  the  cultivated  gentleman.  There  was  beginning 
to  appear,  however,  a  kind  of  story  which  set  up  the  very 
opposite  of  this  ideal;  instead  of  a  knight  errant  who 
goes  on  a  quest  to  find  the  Holy  Grail  or  to  serve  his 
lady,  the  author  gives  us  the  rogue  errant  who  goes  on 
a  quest  to  satisfy  his  appetites.  This  sort  of  story,  called 
picaresque,  from  the  Spanish  picaro  or  rogue,  was  very 
popular  in  Spain,  whence  examples  were  brought  to 
England.  Nashe  imitated  them  in  The  Unfortunate  Trav- 
eller (1594),  which  narrates  the  practical  jokes,  travels, 
and  adventures  of  Jack  Wilton,  an  English  boy  adrift 
on  the  Continent,  enlivened  by  fictitious  interviews  with 
important  persons,  fictitious  eye-witness  accounts  of 
striking  events,  and  other  journalistic  tricks. 

These  writers  represent  the  eccentric,  ornamented, 
often  loosely  constructed  prose  of  the  Renaissance;  a 
prose  which  was  to  be  carried  on  by  the 
writers  of  the  next  generation,  and  to  become 
the  typical  style  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
Beside  them,  however,  must  be  mentioned  a  writer  who 
f.tands  for  a  saner,  more  intellectual  development  of  lit- 
erary style.  During  the  later  years  of  Elizabeth's  reign 
the  country  was  distracted  by  a  dispute  between  the 
Anglican  bishops  and  the  Puritans,  who  denied  their  au- 
thority. This  dispute  soon  passed  the  bounds  of  literary 
controversy;  and  the  refusal  of  the  Puritans  to  attend 
the  services  of  the  Church  of  England,  and  the  efforts  of 
the  government  to  compel  them,  made  the  matter  one  of 
politics.  Before  the  break  was  irreparable,  however,  the 
argument  for  the  authority  of  the  church  was  stated  with 
winning  eloquence  by  Richard  Hooker  (1553-1600)  in  his 
Ecclesiastical  Polity,  four  books  of  which  were  published 
in  1594,  a  fifth  in  1597,  and  three  more  after  the  author's 
death.  As  befits  the  subject,  Hooker's  prose  is  grave 
and  regular,  with  something  of  the  precision  of  classic 
style,  as  opposed  to  the  wilfulness  and  unconventionality 


92  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  Sidney's  romantic  manner.  Indeed,  Hooker  was  the 
earliest  writer  who  developed  a  very  competent  form  of 
English  prose  to  fulfil  a  serious  intellectual  purpose. 

The  development  of  a  great  prose  literature  in  England 
was  reserved  for  a  later  century;  the  chief  glory  of  the 
English  Renaissance  was  its  poetry.  The  experiments 
and  studies  in  foreign  forms,  made  by  Wyatt  and  Surrey, 
were  the  preparation  for  a  period  of  wonderfully  poetic 
achievement,  in  which  two  names  stand  clearly  first.  As 
in  the  drama  there  rises  above  earlier  and  later  play- 
wrights the  single  surpassing  figure  of  Shakespeare,  so  in 
non-dramatic  poetry  stands  pre-eminent  Edmund  Spen- 
ser (1552-1599),  the  poet  of  The  Faerie  Queene. 

Spenser  was  born  in  London  in  1552.  He  was  sent  to 
the  Merchant  Tailors'  School,  and  then  to  Pembroke  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  where  he  took  his  master's 
Spenser.  degree  in  1576.  In  1578  he  was  in  London, 
in  attendance  on  the  Earl  of  Leicester,  seek- 
ing to  establish  himself  through  the  influence  of  his  friends 
at  court.  After  the  publication  of  his  Shepherd's  Calen- 
dar, in  1579,  preferment  came  to  him  in  the  shape  of  an 
appointment  in  Ireland,  as  secretary  to  the  deputy,  Lord 
Grey  de  Wilton.  In  Ireland  Spenser  was  given  office, 
and  bought  the  Manor  of  Kilcolman,  whither  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh  came  to  visit  him.  Raleigh  saw  the  first  three 
books  of  The  Faerie  Queene,  and  under  his  advice  Spenser 
went  to  London  in  the  following  year,  to  read  them  to 
the  Queen  and  to  publish  them.  The  success  of  the  poem 
was  immediate,  but  the  reward  from  the  Queen,  in  whose 
honor  it  was  written,  was  disappointingly  small.  Soon 
after  its  publication  Spenser  put  forth  a  volume  of  poems 
styled  Complaints.  The  circumstances  of  his  journey  to 
London  he  related,  after  his  return  to  Ireland,  in  "Colin 
Clout's  Come  Home  Again,"  in  which  he  resumed  the  pas- 
toral style  of  (The  Shepherd's  Calendar).  In  the  next  few 
years  Spenser  was  busy  with  his  courtship  and  marriage. 


THE    RENAISSANCE  93 

which  are  beautifully  commemorated  in  the  sonnet  series, 
the  "Amoretti,"  and  in  his  wedding-song,  or  "Epithala- 
.mion."  He  went  to  London  again  in  1596  to  publish 
the  second  three  books  of  The  Faerie  Queene.  During 
this  visit  he  wrote  the  "Hymn  of  Heavenly  Love/"  and 
"Hymn  of  Heavenly  Beauty,"  to  accompany  two  earlier 
"Hymns  in  Honor  of  Love  and  Beauty."  He  also  wrote 
in  London  the  most  exquisite  of  his  shorter  poems,  the 
"Prothalamion."  Soon  after  his  return  to  Kilcolman, 
there  broke  out  one  of  those  frequent  insurrections  which 
marked  British  rule  in  Ireland.  Spenser's  castle,  which 
stood  in  the  path  of  the  storm,  was  sacked  and  burned. 
He  fled  with  his  family  to  London,  where,  in  1599,  he 
died. 

Spenser's  life  was  spent  chiefly  in  three  places,  each  of 
which  left  strong  marks  upon  his  character  and  work — 
Cambridge,  London,  and  Ireland.  At  Cam- 
bridge he  found  the  learning  of  the  Renais- 
sance,  especially  the  philosophy  of  Plato, 
which  appears  clearly  in  The  Faerie  Queene  and  in  the 
" Hymns."  Here  also  he  came  to  know  the  literature  of 
France  and  Italy;  his  first  published  work  consisted  of 
translations  from  Petrarch  and  the  French  poet  du  Bellay. 
At  Cambridge,  also,  he  came  into  contact  with  the  literary 
theories  of  the  time,  one  of  which  was  that  English  verse 
should  be  written  according  to  Latin  rules  of  prosody. 
This  subject  is  discussed  at  length  in  the  letters  which 
passed  between  Spenser,  after  he  removed  to»Londonr 
and  his  Cambridge  friend,  Gabriel  Harvey.  Spenser  was 
too  genuine  a  poet  to  be  injured  by  such  theories,  but  the 
influence  of  the  environment  where  they  were  rife  is  seen 
in  hi?  scrupulous  attention  to  the  technical  requirements 
of  his  art. 

Of  this  Cambridge  period  the  typical  product  is  The 
Shepherd's  Calendar,  a  series  of  twelve  pastoral  poems  or 
eclogues.  The  eclogue  in  general  was  a  poem  of  pastoral 


94  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

life,  in  which  shepherds  were  the  speakers,  rural  nature 
and   love   their  usual  themes.     The   poet    might    intro- 
duce matter  personal  to  himself  or  his  friends, 
"The  or  might  even  discuss  political  affairs,  but  he 

Shepherd's  *. 

Calendar."  kept  the  conventional  framework.  In  Spen- 
ser's fifth  eclogue,  for  example,  Archbishop 
Grindal  figures  as  the  good  shepherd  Algrind.  The  poems 
of  The  Shepherd's  Calendar  show  much  variety  in  metre, 
for  Spenser  was  clearly  practising  and  experimenting. 
But  most  remarkable  among  their  literary  qualities  is 
the  diction,  which  he  elaborated  for  himself  with  the 
design  of  giving  a  suggestion  of  antiquity  and  rusticity 
to  his  writing.  This  curious  predilection  for  obsolete  or 
coined  words  is  one  manifestation  of  the  artificial  style 
affected  by  the  age.  It  is  carried  so  far  in  The  Faerie 
Queene  that  Ben  Jonson  could  say  of  Spenser  that  he 
"writ  no  language.". 

In  London  Spenser  was  at  the  centre  of  the  thrilling  na- 
tional life  of  England.     Through  Leicester  and  Sidney  he 
was  introduced  to  the  two  leading  political 
London'  aUd      concepti°ns  of  the  time,  England's  leadership 
Ireland.  of  the  Protestant  cause  in  Europe  against 

Spain  and  Rome,  and  her  expansion  beyond 
the  seas;  ideas  that  were  the  result  partly  of  fantastic 
chivalry,  and  partly  of  a  broad  view  of  world  politics. 
Finally,  in  Ireland  he  saw  the  English  race  in  passionate 
conflict  with  opposing  forces.  The  chronically  disturbed 
state  of  the  country  was  aggravated  by  the  intrigues  of 
Philip  of  Spain  and  the  Pope  with  the  Irish  chieftains, 
provoking  those  revolts  which  Lord  Grey,  strong  in  his 
belief  that  the  Irish  were  the  foes  of  God  and  of  civiliza- 
tion, put  down  with  savage  fury.  Naturally,  Spenser's 
residence  in  Ireland,  by  bringing  him  into  actual  conflict 
with  evil,  stimulated  his  moral  enthusiasm.  Out  of  the 
conception  of  the  greatness  of  England's  mission  which 
Spenser  found  in  London  and  struggled  to  realize  in  Ire- 


THE   RENAISSANCE  95 

land,  and  out  of  his  chivalric  devotion  to  this  ideal  and 
to  the  Queen  who  typified  it,  grew  The  Faerie  Queene. 
It  is  the  brightest  expression  of  the  ideal  morality  of  the 
time;  and  in  a  sense  is  the  epic  of  the  English  race  at  one 
of  the  great  moments  of  its  history. 

Spenser  and  his  contemporaries  regarded  moral  purpose 
as  essential  to  the  greatest  art;  and  with  Spenser  this  pur- 
pose took  the  form  of  dealing  with  the  old 
problem  of  the  Renaissance — individual  char-  structure  of 
acter  in  relation  to  the  state.  As  he  explained  "The  Fa«rie 
in  his  introductory  letter  to  Raleigh,  The 
Faerie  Queene  was  to  show  forth  the  character  of  an  ideal 
knight,  in  twelve  books,  each  devoted  to  one  of  the  twelve 
qualities  of  perfect  chivalry.  This  exposition  of  private 
virtue  was  to  be  followed  by  a  second  poem,  which  should 
portray  the  virtues  of  the  ideal  knight  as  governor.  In 
fact,  Spenser  wrote  only  six  books,  each  of  twelve  cantos; 
and  a  fragment  of  a  seventh.  The  first  is  given  to  the 
Red  Cross  Knight,  who  represents  Holiness;  the  second 
to  Sir  Guyon,  or  Temperance;  the  third  to  Britomarte, 
or  Chastity;  the  fourth  to  Cambel  and  Triamond,  or 
Friendship;  the  fifth  to  Sir  Artegall,  or  Justice;  the  sixth 
to  Sir  Cah'dore,  or  Courtesy.  These  knights,  as  we  learn 
from  Spenser's  introductory  letter,  are  despatched  on 
their  various  quests  by  Gloriana,  Queen  of  Fairyland. 
In  the  course  of  their  adventures  appears  from  time  to 
time  the  perfect  knight,  Arthur,  who  is  himself  in  search 
of  the  Faerie  Queene.  The  thread  of  the  narrative  is 
much  interrupted  by  episodes.  Moreover,  the  allegory, 
which  should  give  unity  to  the  whole,  is  inconsistent  and 
complicated.  It  takes  at  times  a  political  turn,  and  the 
characters,  besides  representing  ideal  qualities,  refer  di- 
rectly to  actual  persons.  Spenser  explained:  ''In  that 
Faerie  Queene  I  meane  glory  in  my  generall  intention, 
but  in  my  particular  I  conceive  the  most  excellent  and 
glorious  person  of  our  soveraine  the  Queene."  Belphcebe 


96  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  Britomarte  also  represent  Elizabeth;  Arthur  is  Leices- 
ter; the  false  lady  Duessa  is  Mary  Queen  of  Scots.  In 
the  fifth  book  the  political  state  of  Europe  is  presented  at 
length,  with  Lord  Grey  as  Artegall,  France  as  Flourdelis, 
Henry  IV  as  Burbon,  Holland  as  Beige,  and  Philip  II  of 
Spain  as  Grantorto.  This  was  but  natural  in  an  age  in 
which  politics  were  largely  a  matter  of  religion,  and  in 
which  public  and  private  conduct,  as  typified  by  Sidney, 
Raleigh,  and  Essex,  was  still  touched  with  something  of 
the  glamour  of  the  chivalry  which  had  passed  away. 

The  moral  seriousness  which  underlies  the  poem  marks 
the  great  difference  between  The  Faerie  Queene  and  its 

Italian  prototype.     Spenser,  like  Wyatt  and 
d     Surrey,  was  content  to  go  to  school  to  Italy; 

and  he  chose  as  the  model  for  his  great  work 
the  Orlando  Furioso  of  Ariosto.  Both  Ariosto  and  Spen- 
ser deal  with  chivalry;  but  while  Ariosto  had  merely  the 
delight  of  the  artist  in  the  brilliant  color  which  chivalry 
gave  to  life,  with  the  easy  contempt  of  the  cynic  for  its 
moral  pretensions,  Spenser  found  in  its  persons  and  ideals 
a  means  of  making  goodness  attractive.  Ariosto  pictures 
chivalric  action  because  it  is  dramatic  and  exciting,  not 
because  he  believes  in  it.  Spenser  deals  with  action  be- 
cause he  must.  His  world  is  one  which,  according  to  the 
Platonic  conception,  is  capable  of  being  brought  into  har- 
mony with  an  ideal.  Naturally,  to  him  the  virtues  which 
make  for  the  effectiveness  of  the  individual  and  the  prog- 
ress of  the  race  are  of  supreme  importance;  and  the  op- 
posing vices,  idleness,  gluttony,  lechery,  and  above  all 
despair,  are  the  objects  of  his  fiercest  attack. 

In  details  Spenser  learned  much  from  Ariosto;  many 

passages  he  wrote  in  avowed  imitation.  His 
The  prevailing  difference  is  in  the  greater  richness 

sEmzSa.naE        and  elaboration  of  his  style,  of  which  the  verse 

form  of  The  Faerie  Queene,  the  Spenserian 
stanza,  is  typical.  Ariosto  wrote  in  ottai)  rima,  that  is, 


THE   RENAISSANCE  97 

in  stanzas  of  eight  lines  rhyming  thus:  a,  b,  a,  b,  a,  b,  c,  c. 
Spenser  used  a  more  complicated  stanza  of  his  own,  with 
rhymes  arranged  thus,  a,  6,  a,  6,  6,  c,  b,  c,  c,  the  last  line  be- 
ing an  Alexandrine,  or  line  of  six  feet.  The  brilliancy  of 
the  invention  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  it  adapts  itself 
readily  to  the  different  demands  of  narrative,  descriptive, 
and  moral  poetry;  and  that  the  poem  sustains  itself 
throughout  its  great  length  with  so  little  effect  of  same- 
ness. 

Spenser  had  the  great  gift  of  the  pdet,  the  power  to 
create  the  illusion  of  a  different  world,  a  world  of  magic 
where  the  imagination  and  the  senses  are 
satisfied.  With  all  his  morality,  Spenser  Spenser's 
shared  in  the  rich  sensuous  life  which  the 
Renaissance  had  thrown  open  to  men.  This  immediate 
reliance  upon  the  senses  is  one  of  the  elements  of  reality 
which  give  greatness  to  his  poem.  The  Faerie  Queene  is 
a  long  procession  of  figures,  brilliant,  fantastic,  or  terri- 
ble, which  singly  or  in  groups  pass  across  an  ever-varying, 
ever-wonderful  landscape.  And  almost  as  marked  as 
his  feeling  for  form  and  color  is  his  use  of  sound.  His 
sensitiveness  of  ear  is  shown  by  the  melody  of  his  verse, 
so  constant  yet  so  varied;  but  there  are  also  many  pas- 
sages in  which  he  makes  the  music  of  nature  an  element 
of  pleasure  in  his  palace  of  art,  notably  in  the  description 
of  the  Bower  of  Bliss,  in  Book  II,  Canto  XII.  And  more 
poignant  sensuous  appeal  is  not  lacking.  Altogether, 
Spenser  has  the  resources  of  the  whole  world  of  sensation 
at  command,  and  he  never  fails  to  heighten  them  with 
the  illusions  of  his  art.  Of  the  color,  the  savor,  the 
music  of  life,  his  poem  is  full — only  the  color  is  brighter, 
the  taste  sweeter,  the  music  grander,  than  any  which  it 
is  given  to  mortal  senses  to  know. 

And  this  world  of  imagined  splendor  is  presented  as 
the  background  of  a  steadily  growing  idea  of  righteous- 
ness, of  heroic  goodness.  The  union  of  the  two  ele- 


98  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ments,  sensuous  and  moral,  seems  at  times    to  involve 

a  naive  inconsistency.     But  Spenser  belonged  to  an  age 

when   it   seemed   not   impossible   that   there 

His  Morality. 

should  be  some  common  ground  between  the 
spirit  of  the  Reformation  and  that  of  humanism.  He 
was  perhaps  a  Puritan;  but,  more  fortunate  than  Milton, 
he  came  before  Puritanism  had  narrowed  its  view  of  life 
to  the  single  issue  of  salvation.  There  is,  indeed,  in 
Spenser,  as  in  many  of  his  contemporaries,  a  note  of 
melancholy,  which  suggests  that  the  eternal  contradic- 
tion of  the  joy  of  the  present  life  by  the  threat  of  its 
hereafter,  was  not  unheard.  The  flowers  are  already 
lightly  touched  by  the  frost.  But  this  reminder  that; 
the  time  of  free  delight  in  the  world  of  sense  was  so 
short,  its  sunshine  so  threatened  by  the  clouds  01 
Puritanism,  makes  its  most  signal  product  the  more, 
precious. 

Spenser's  latent  Puritanism  can  be  traced  in  the  reserve 
with  which  he  usually  treats  passion.  A  franker,-  more 
unrestrained  abandonment  to  sensuous  feeling 
Chapman  °^  everv  kind  marks  such  poems  as  Shake- 
speare's Venus  and  Adonis,  and  Marlowe's 
Hero  and  Leander,  in  which  the  tide  of  the  Renaissance 
in  England  reaches  its  height.  Marlowe  died  before  he 
could  complete  the  poem,  which  was  finished  by  George 
Chapman  (1559-1634).  Chapman  was  one  of  the  most 
considerable  literary  men  of  the  time.  His  appearance 
as  a  poet  was  somewhat  late,  his  first  important  work 
being  Ovid's  Banquet  of  Sense  (1595).  Three  years  later 
he  published  the  last  four  books  of  Hero  an  Leandet. 
His  famous  translation  of  the  Iliad  he  completed  in 
1611,  and  the  Odyssey  two  years  later.  Long  before  this-. 
in  1595,  he  had  begun  to  write  for  the  stage,  his  greal: 
work  being  a  series  of  tragedies  on  subjects  drawn  from 
the  history  of  France  during  the  time  of  Catherine  do 
Medici's  influence. 


THE    RENAISSANCE  99 

In  his  poetry,  both  original  and  translated,  Chapman 
is  rather  a  man  of  the  succeeding  age  than  an  Elizabethan. 
In  him  the  fulness  and  splendor  of  Eliza- 
bethan poetry,  which  had  reached  their  height 
in  Spenser,  tend  to  elaboration,  conceit,  and 
obscurity,  faults  which  unfortunately  mar  the  greatest 
of  his  works,  the  translation  of  Homer.  For  the  Iliad 
he  chose  the  old  English  ballad  metre.  The  sustained 
movement  of  this  measure  gives  it  a  certain  likeness -to 
Homer's  hexameters;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  its  facility 
and  informality  tend  to  produce  a  jog-trot  familiarity  in 
place  of  Homer's  rapidity  and  nobility.  Moreover, 
Chapman  is  deliberately  indirect  and  fanciful,  where 
Homer  is  direct  and  simple.  Nevertheless,  it  was  a  cir- 
cumstance almost  as  fortunate  in  its  way  for  the  English 
people  as  the  series  of  happy  accidents  by  virtue  of  which 
the  English  Bible  became  great  literature,  that  the  first 
translation  of  the  noblest  poetry  of  antiquity  should  have 
been  made  by  one  who,  in  spite  of  all  his  failings,  was  a 
true  poet. 

Spenser's  Faerie  Queene  and  Marlowe's  and  Chapman's 
Hero  and  Leander  are  perhaps  the  only  long  poems  of  the 
Elizabethan  period  which  are  still  read.  For 

,      ,  ,  ,  Other  Poets. 

the  poets  of  that  day,  keenly  interested  as 
they  were  in  artistic  problems,  failed  to  solve  the  most 
essential  of  them;  they  never  separated  the  proper  sub- 
ject-matter of  poetry  from  that  of  prose.  They  gave 
verse  form  not  only  to  history,  but  also  to  politics,  phi- 
losophy, geography,  and  science.  Accordingly  many  of 
them,  in  spite  of  genuine  poetic  gift,  have  all  but  dis- 
appeared from  view,  hopelessly  distanced  in  the  race  for 
immortality  by  reason  of  their  bulk  of  unpoetical  mate- 
rial. One  of  these  leviathans  is  Michael  Drayton  (1563- 
1631).  He  devoted  himself  largely  to  history,  his  most 
characteristic  work  being  m's  Barons'  Wars,  an  account  of 
the  deposition  of  Edward  II  and  the  subsequent  fall  of 


100  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Mortimer.  Drayton  was  capable  of  gaining  a  genuine 
inspiration  from  history,  as  is  shown  by  his  superb  "  Bal- 
lad of  Agincourt,"  the  ringing  metre  of  which  is  preserved 
in  Tennyson's  "Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade."  Unfor- 
tunately he  is  known  not  by  this  spirited  lyric,  but  as  the 
author  of  Polyolbion,  a  huge  poem  in  Alexandrines,  con- 
taining a  descriptive  geography  of  England.  Like  Dray- 
ton,  Samuel  Daniel  (1562-1619)  served  the  historical 
muse  in  a  long  narrative  of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses,  and 
he  wrote  also  a  poem  called  Musophilus,  or  "A  general 
defense  of  all  learning."  Among  other  curiosities  of 
poetic  treatment  are  William  Warner's  Albion's  England; 
Lord  Brooke's  Poems  of  Monarchy  and  Treatise  on  Re- 
ligion; Sir  John  Davies's  Nosce  Teipsum,  a  poem  on  human 
life  and  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  Mistaken  as  such 
efforts  in  poetry  seem  to  us,  they  must  Be  thought  of  as 
part  of  that  attempt  already  mentioned  to  give  the  Eng- 
lish nation  a  literature  worthy  of  its  past  and  its  high 
destiny. 

It  is  not  of  these  works,  however,  that  we  think  when 
we  speak  of  the  glory  of  Elizabethan  verse,  but  of  the 

.  lyric  quality  which  in  nearly  all  the  poets  of 

the  time  flows  somewhere  as  a  stream  of  liv- 
ing water,  making  glad  even  the  waste  places  of  their 
larger  works.  Almost  every  poet  of  note  published  his 
cycle  of  love  songs  and  sonnets;  besides  Shakespeare's, 
Spenser's,  and  Sidney's  sonnets,  there  are  Constable's 
Diana,  Daniel's  Delia,  Drayton's  Idea,  Lodge's  Phyllis. 
Many  of  them  published  series  of  eclogues  in  the  man- 
ner of  Spenser's  Shepherd's  Calendar — Drayton's  Shep- 
herd's Garland  being  among  the  most  beautiful.  But 
much  more  precious  than  this  conventional  and  formal 
lyric  art  is  the  less  premeditated  singing  of  scores  of 
poets,  which  was  collected  in  the  poetic  miscellanies, 
such  as  The  Phcenix  Nest,  England's  Helicon,  and  Davi- 
son's  Poetical  Rhapsody,  and  in  the  song-books. 


THE   RENAISSANCE  IOI 

Many  of  the  fugitive  lyrics  of  the  period  are  of  doubt- 
ful attribution  or  altogether  anonymous,  but  of  the  songs 
that  can  be  assigned  to  any  one  writer  a 
large  share  belongs  to  Thomas  Campion 
(1540-1613).  Campion's  verse  is  practically 
and  honestly  adapted  to  musical  requirements,  for  the 
Elizabethan  poet  always  conceived  of  a  song  as  a  thing 
to  be  sung.  Like  many  of  his  contemporaries,  Campion 
was  stirred  to  rapture  alike  by  sacred  and  profane  love. 
Indeed,  one  of  the  peculiarities  of  the  Elizabethan  lyric 
poets  is  their  mingling  of  sensuousness  and  piety — the  lat- 
ter not  induced  by  fear  of  death,  but  by  a  trust  in  the 
Creator  as  frank  and  honest  as  was  their  delight  in  the 
world  which  He  had  made. 

How  common  was  the  lyrical  gift  in  the  last  years  of 
Elizabeth's  reign,  is  shown  by  the  number  of  men  of 
action  who  were  also  poets.  The  group  of 
literary  courtiers,  of  whom  Sidney  was  the  p0ets°^ 
chief,  included  a  name  as  famous  as  his,  that 
of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (1552-1618).  Raleigh's  place  in 
literature  belongs  to  him  chiefly  through  his  History  of 
the  World,  one  of  the  monuments  of  English  prose  in  the 
next  century;  but  the  fragment  of  a  long  poem,  Cynthia, 
the  sonnet  introductory  to  The  Faerie  Queene,  and  various 
tags  of  verse  like  the  reply  to  Marlowe's  "Come,  live  with 
me  and  be  my  Love,"  and  "The  Lie,"  show  that  he  pos- 
sessed, in  the  words  of  a  critic  of  the  time,  a  vein  of 
poetry  "most  lofty,  insolent,  and  passionate."  The  tone 
of  his  poetry  is  on  the  whole  singularly  gloomy  and  bit- 
ter. His  verses  commemorate,  for  the  most  part,  times 
of  reaction  and  trouble  in  his  checkered  life,  when  he 
was  thrown  back  by  failure  on  the  scepticism,  distrust, 
and  contempt  that  were  fundamental  in  his  nature. 

Raleigh's  rival  both  in  glory  and  in  misfortune,  the 
Earl  of  Essex,  the  brother  of  Sidney's  Stella,  was  himself 
a  poet.  Another  member  of  the  group  of  courtly  poets 


102        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

was  Sir  Edward  Dyer,  a  friend  of  Sidney's,  who  is  re- 
membered as  the  writer  of  the  lines,  "My  mind  to  me  a 
Kingdom  is."  Still  another  was  the  Earl  of  Oxford. 

The  lyric  and  the  drama  must  be  counted  as  the  great 
literary  forms  of  the  period,  for  these  two  represented 
truth  to  feeling  and  truth  to  life.  Upon  the  rest  of  the 
literature  of  the  sixteenth  century,  even  including  Spen- 
ser's wonderful  poem,  rested  a  blight  of  artificiality. 
The  age  was  in  the  main  one  of  conscious  learning  from 
masters,  classical  and  foreign;  of  imitation;  of  uncer- 
tainty as  to  the  principles  and  the  uses  of  literature.  The 
writers  of  the  time  were  hampered  by  uncritical  selection 
of  material,  by  the  requirements  of  conventions  such  as 
that  which  prescribed  the  pastoral,  even  by  absurd  the- 
ories such  as  that  which  tried  to  proscribe  rhyme.  Only 
in  two  directions,  the  lyric  and  the  drama,  did  they  wict 
complete  freedom,  and  in  both  they  used  it  grandly. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  RENAISSANCE:  THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEA&E 

THE  drama,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  was  the  most 
popular  literary  form  of  the  Renaissance,  as  it  was  also 
the  most  powerful  and  spontaneous.  It  ex- 
pressed, as  no  other  literary  product  could 
have  done,  the  manifold  life  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan age.  Its  chief  glory  is;  of  course,  Shakespeare; 
but  the  school  of  dramatists  from  which  Shakespeare 
proceeded  was  the  result  of  a  steady  growth,  prolonged 
through  nearly  four  centuries.  To  trace  the  English 
drama  from  the  beginning,  we  must  go  back  even  beyond 
the  Norman  conquest. 

One  familiar  with  the  highly  developed  forms  of  trag- 
edy and  comedy  which  existed  in  ancient  Greece  and 
iRome   might   naturally  presume   that   there 
was   a   continuous   stream   of  plays   derived     The  Decline 

of  Roman 

from  these  throughout  the  Middle  Ages;  but  Drama. 
1his  presumption  would  be  entirely  contrary 
to  the  facts.  Both  tragedy  and  comedy  were  native  to 
Greece  and  flourished  there  with  splendid  natural  vigor. 
In  Rome,  on  the  other  hand,  they  were  exotic,  a  literary 
fad  or  fashion  introduced  from  Greece  and  cultivated 
only  by  a  comparatively  small  circle  of  the  upper  classes. 
The  popular  stage  entertainments  of  Rome  were  more 
like  our  vaudeville  or  variety  shows,  and  as  Roman  cul- 
ture decayed  they  became  less  and  less  dramatic  and 
unspeakably  indecent  and  immoral.  As  the  Christian 
Church  grew  in  power,  its  opposition  to  the  stage  became 
more  effective.  Plays  were  prohibited  and  actors  pro- 
scribed in  city  after  city  throughout  the  Roman  Empire. 


104  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Some  three  or  four  hundred  years  after  the  death  of 
the  Roman  stage  there  began  to  appear  in  the  services  of 
the  church  bits  of  drama,  so  tiny  and  so 
Religious  simple  dramatically  that  they  may  well  have 
th^ra^a.  been  composed  with  no  clear  appreciation 
of  their  significance.  The  earliest  of  these 
was  a  little  scene  representing  the  visit  of  the  three 
Marys  to  the  sepulchre  of  Christ  on  Easter  morning,  and 
their  interview  with  the  angels  who  are  there  to  tell  them 
that  Christ  has  risen  and  will  meet  them  in  Galilee.  The 
dialogue  consists  of  only  four  sentences,  but  the  little 
scene  contains  the  essential  elements  of  drama;  it  pre- 
sents a  story  by  means  of  actors  who  impersonate  the 
characters  of  the  story.  Soon  this  scene  was  enlarged 
by  the  introduction  of  other  characters,  the  expansion 
of  the  dialogue.  Other  scenes  of  Bible  history  were  also 
dramatized  as  parts  of  the  church  service:  the  Visit  of 
the  Shepherds  to  the  New-Born  Babe  at  Bethlehem,  the 
Visit  of  the  Magi  or  Wise  Men  of  the  East,  the  Slaughter 
of  the  Innocents,  and  finally  a  whole  series  of  scenes  from 
the  Old  Testament.  At  first  all  these  scenes  were  writ- 
ten in  Latin  and  were  sung  as  parts  of  the  service  of  the 
church.  But  as  they  increased  in  number  and  in  size 
they  were  first  separated  from  the  service,  then  translated 
into  the  language  of  the  common  people,  and  finally 
presented  outside  of  the  church — in  the  church  porch, 
or  the  church  yard,  or  some  public  square. 

The  earliest  of  these  little  plays  was  composed  on  the 
Continent  about  the  year  900.  The  earliest  of  which  we 
have  any  record  in  England  belongs  to  the 
last  third  of  the  tenth  century.  The  devel- 
opment of  which  we  have  just  spoken  occu- 
pied about  four  hundred  years  and  by  the  beginning  of 
the  fourteenth  century  had  resulted  in  vast  plays  or 
series  of  plays  which  were  performed  once  a  year  in  most 
of  the  principal  towns  of  England.  Four  complete  sets 


THE   DRAMA    BEFORE    SHAKESPEARE  105 

of  these  have  been  preserved  to  us.  Three  of  these  sets  of 
plays — cycles  they  are  commonly  called — belonged  to 
the  cities  of  York,  Wakefield,  and  Chester,  and  are 
called  by  their  names.  We  have  fragments  also  from 
Norwich,  Newcastle-on-Tyne,  and  Dublin,  and  records 
of  performances  in  many  places.  All  these  plays  were 
alike  in  origin  and  structure  and  general  content.  They 
begin  with  the  Creation  and  treat  biblical  episodes  relat- 
ing to  the  plan  of  salvation,  including  always  the  Crea- 
tion and  Fall  of  Adam  and  Eve,  the  Death  of  Abel,  the 
Deluge,  the  Sacrifice  of  Isaac,  the  Prophecies  of  the  Com- 
ing of  Christ,  the  Birth,  Death,  and  Resurrection  of 
Christ,  and  the  Final  Judgment.  In  their  own  day  they 
were  called  Corpus  Christi  plays  or  Whitsun  plays,  from 
the  time  at  which  they  were  performed,  or  Craft  plays, 
because  they  were  performed  by  the  crafts  or  trades- 
guilds  of  the  towns.  In  France  somewhat  similar  plays 
were  called  Mysteres,  and  for  the  last  hundred  and  fifty 
years  it  has  been  customary  with  scholars  to  call  the 
English  plays  Mysteries  or  Mystery  Plays. 

In  order  to  gain  some  idea  of  the  appeal  made  by  such 
plays  to  the  audience  for  which  they  were  intended,  let 
us  imagine  ourselves  for  a  moment  in  a  pro- 
vincial English  town  at  the  beginning  of  the 
fifteenth  century,  on  the  morning  of  Corpus 
Christi  day.  Weeks  beforehand  heralds  have  made  the 
round  of  the  city  and  the  neighboring  villages  to  an- 
nounce the  coming  spectacle.  The  places  where  the  cars 
or  "pageants,"  which  form  both  stage  and  dressing-room, 
are  to  stop,  are  crowded  with  the  motley  population  of  a 
mediaeval  city  and  countryside.  The  spectators  of  con- 
sequence occupy  seats  upon  scaffolds  erected  for  the  pur- 
pose, or  look  on  from  the  windows  of  neighboring  houses, 
while  the  humbler  folk  jostle  each  other  in  the  street. 
Soon  the  first  pageant  appears,  a  great  box  mounted  on 
four  or  six  wheels,  and  drawn  by  horses  belonging  to  the 


106  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

masons'  guild,  which  guild  is  charged  with  presenting  the 
Creation  of  Eve  and  the  Fall  of  Man.  The  curtains  at 
the  front  and  the  side  of  the  great  box  are  drawn,  reveal- 
ing an  upper  compartment,  within  which  the  main  action 
is  to  take  place.  On  a  raised  platform  sits  enthroned  a 
majestic  person  in  a  red  robe,  with  gilt  hair  and  beard, 
impersonating  the  Creator.  Before  him  lies  Adam, 
dressed  in  a  close-fitting  leather  garment  painted  white 
or  flesh-color.  The  Creator,  after  announcing  his  inten- 
tion of  making  for  Adam  a  helpmeet,  descends  and  touches 
the  sleeper's  side.  Thereupon  Eve  rises  through  a  trap- 
door, and  Adam  wakes  rejoicing.  Again  the  Creator 
ascends  to  his  throne,  and  Adam  withdraws  to  a  corner 
of  the  pageant,  leaving  Eve  to  be  tempted  by  a  great 
serpent  cunningly  contrived  of  green  and  gold  cloth,  in 
which  an  actor  is  concealed.  This  monster,  crawling 
upon  the  stage  from  below,  harangues  Eve  with  lengthy 
eloquence.  Then  follows  the  eating  of  the  apple  and  the 
coming  of  God's  angels,  with  gilt  hair,  scarlet  robes,  and 
swords  waved  and  ridged  like  fire,  to  drive  the  pair  from 
the  garden  into  the  wilderness,  that  is,  into  the  lower 
compartment  of  the  pageant,  which  is  now  uncovered  to 
view.  A  trumpeter  advances  before  the  car,  and  sounds 
a  long  note  in  token  of  the  conclusion  of  the  play.  The 
horses  are  reharnessed  to  the  car,  and  it  moves  off  to  the 
next  station,  to  be  replaced  by  others.  These  represent 
in  turn  Noah's  Flood,  given  by  the  guild  of  water-mer- 
chants; the  Sacrifice  of  Isaac,  given  bv  the  butchers' 
guild;  the  Nativity,  the  Crucifixion,  and  so  on  in  long 
procession,  until  the  crowning  spectacle  of  the  Day  of 
Judgment.  The  chief  feature  of  spectacular  interest  in 
this  last  is  Hell-Mouth,  a  great  dragon's  jaw  belching 
flame  and  smoke,  into  which  lost  souls,  dressed  in  black 
and  yellow  parti-color,  are  tossed  by  the  devil — a  most 
satisfactory  character  with  a  bright  red  beard,  a  hairy 
body,  a  hideous  mask,  horns,  and  a  long  forked  tail. 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE         1 07 

Crude  and  even  grotesque  as  much  of  this  seems,  the 
miracle  play  was,  to  the  men  of  the  Middle  Ages,  a  very 
impressive  thing.  It  not  only  appealed  to 
their  religious  natures  and  to  their  love  of  Germs  of 
spectacle;  it  also  interested  them  profoundly  Drama.' 
from  the  human  side.  For  the  authors  were 
free  to  embellish  the  biblical  story  with  episodes  drawn 
from  the  common  life  of  their  own  day.  Even  when 
these  added  episodes  took  a  broadly  farcical  turn,  nobody 
was  shocked,  any  more  than  by  the  stone  imps  and  mon- 
sters which  grinned  at  them  from  the  solemn  shadows  of 
their  cathedrals.  In  the  play  of  Noah's  Flood,  the  patri- 
arch causes  first  the  animals  to  enter  the  Ark,  then  his 
sons  and  daughters-in-law;  but  when  he  comes  to  his  wife, 
she  objects.  She  does  not  relish  being  cooped  up  without 
her  '"gossips,"  and  leaving  these  amiable  women  to 
drown.  Remonstrances  at  last  proving  fruitless,  Noah 
resorts  to  the  argument  of  blows,  and  drives  his  scolding 
helpmeet  into  the  Ark,  to  the  great  delight  of  the  crowd. 
In  the  play  of  Abraham  and  Isaac,  the  yearning  love  of 
the  old  man  for  his.  little  son,  and  the  sweet,  trustful  na- 
ture of  the  boy,  are  brought  home  to  us  in  such  a  way  as 
to  intensify  the  pathos  of  the  moment  when  Abraham 
makes  ready,  at  the  Lord's  command,  to  sacrifice  the  life 
which  is  dearest  to  him  on  earth.  The  pleading  of  the 
boy,  the  gradual  overmastering  of  his  fear  of  death  by 
his  pity  for  his  father's  anguish  and  his  solicitude  for  his 
mother's  grief,  are  rendered  with  touching  truth. 

Therfor  doo  owr  Lordes  bydding, 
And  wan  I  am  ded,  then  prey  for  me: 
But,  good  fader,  tell  ye  my  moder  no-thyng, 
Say  that  I  am  in  another  cunthre  dwellyng. 

In  these  episodes,  and  in  many  others  which  might  be 
given,  lie  the  germs  of  regular  drama.  Such  humorous 
scenes  as  the  quarrel  of  Noah  and  his. wife  constitute  in 


108  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

reality  crude  little  comedies  out  of  which  regular  comedy 
could  readily  grow.  In  such  tragic  scenes  as  the  Sacrifice 
of  Isaac,  the  Slaughter  of  the  Innocents,  and  the  Crucifix- 
ion, the  elements  of  noble  tragedy  were  already  present. 
Another  type  of  play  very  popular  in  England  during 
the  Middle  Ages  was  the  Miracle  Play.  It  was  a  dram- 
atization of  the  legend  of  some  saint  or  mar- 
tyr  and  presented  either  miracles  performed 
by  the  saint  or  his  relics  or  image,  or  the  suf- 
ferings and  death  of  the  martyr.  The  earliest  of  these 
was  the  play  of  Saint  Katharine,  performed  by  the 
schoolboys  of  Dunstable  about  the  year  mo,  under  the 
direction  of  their  schoolmaster  Geoffrey.  The  latest  were 
perhaps  the  three  performed  at  Braintree  in  Essex,  from 
1529  to  1533,  to  obtain  funds  for  roofing  the  church. 
These  plays  must  have  given  a  better  opportunity  for 
free  composition  and  for  the  development  of  realism  in 
the  presentation  of  character  and  incident  than  the  Mys- 
teries, but  unfortunately  no  typical  examples  of  this  class 
of  plays  have  come  down  to  us,  except  the  late  fifteenth  - 
century  Play  of  the  Sacrament  and  The  Life  and  Repen- 
tance of  Mary  Magdalen. 

Both  Mysteries  and  Miracle  Plays  dealt  primarily  with 
the  teachings  of  the  church,  theological  or  devotional. 
The  Moraii  T°  comPlete  this  teaching  there  was  needed 
Plays.  °n  7  some  exposition  of  the  ethical  side  of  religion, 
which  deals  with  matters  of  conduct;  and  it 
was  this  ethical  doctrine  which  the  "morality  plays" 
tried  to  bring  home  to  men's  minds.  The  Morality  was 
a  dramatized  allegory.  By  means  of  personifications  of 
such  abstractions  as  the  World,  the  Flesh,  Mankind, 
Mercy,  Justice,  Peace,  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins,  Good  and 
Bad  Angels,  Old  Age,  and  Death,  the  Morality  Plays 
attempted  to  represent,  in  a  graphic  way  which  would 
appeal  to  popular  audiences,  the  conflict  between  sin  and 
righteousness  for  the  possession  of  the  human  soul.  The 


THE    DRAMA    BEFORE    SHAKESPEARE  109 

early  Moralities  have  an  earnestness  of  purpose,  and  a 
largeness  of  theme,  which  make  them  no  unworthy  sup- 
plement to  the  mystery  cycles.  One  of  the  most  impres- 
sive is  Everyman,  which  presents  the  soul  (called  Every- 
man) as  summoned  by  Death  to  appear  before  God,  and 
appealing  to  all  the  forces  upon  which  he  had  relied  in 
this  life — Riches,  Beauty,  Strength,  Friendship,  Kindred 
— to  go  with  and  support  him,  but  deserted  by  all  except 
the  despised  Good  Deeds.  Little  by  little,  however,  their 
character  changed:  the  treatment  was  narrowed  so  as 
to  include  only  a  single  aspect  of  man's  life;  the  charac- 
ters became  less  and  less  abstract,  and  farcical  matter 
was  introduced  to  lighten  the  intolerably  solemn  tone. 
In  most  of  the  Moralities,  from  the  middle  of  the  fifteenth 
century  onward,  the  principal  character  is  one  called  by 
various  names,  but  usually  labelled  the  Vice.  In  some 
plays  he  is  only  a  comic  figure,  dressed  in  the  costume  of 
a  court-fool,  carrying  a  sword  of  lath,  and  indulging  in 
slapstick  farce  for  the  delectation  of  the  crowd;  but  more 
often  he  has  the  additional  function  of  master  of  all  the 
intrigue,  creating  misunderstanding  and  strife  by  in- 
genious tricks  or  wilful  lies.  By  some  critics  he  is  sup- 
posed to  survive  in  the  fools  of  Shakespeare's  plays,  but 
these  have  little  or  nothing  to  do  with  the  Vice;  they  are 
merely  the  court-fool  or  domestic  fool  of  the  time  trans- 
ferred to  the  stage.  The  Vice  appears  in  such  early  plays 
as  Gammer  Gurton's  Needle  and  Ralph  Roister  Bolster;  if 
he  appears  at  all  in  the  plays  of  Shakespeare  and  his 
successors,  it  is  rather  in  the  guise  of  the  motiveless, 
intriguing  villain  than  in  that  of  the  fool. 

About  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  while 
the  moralities  were  yet  in  the  height  of  their  vogue,  arose 
another  form  of  play  called  loosely  the  Inter- 
lude— though  interlude  was  a  term  originally       interludes, 
applied   vaguely   to   any  sort  of  play  brief 
enough  to  be  presented  in  the  intervals  of  a  banquet  or 


HO  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

other  entertainment.  These  plays  were  very  different 
in  type  and  in  origin.  Some  were  derived  from  the  Mo- 
ralities themselves,  some  from  French  farces,  some  from 
debats  (a  French  species  of  controversial  dialogue) ;  some 
from  Latin  school-plays,  and  some  by  the  simple  process 
of  dramatizing  an  anecdote  in  prose  or  verse.  In  the 
old  play  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  a  band  of  strolling  players 
is  announced  while  Sir  Thomas  is  dining,  and  they  per- 
form an  Interlude  before  him  and  his  guests.  Usually 
these  pieces  had  little  action  and  required  almost  no 
stage-setting.  For  example,  The  Four  P's,  by  John  Hey- 
wood,  "a  newe  and  a  very  mery  enterlude  of  a  Palmer, 
a  Pardoner,  a  Potycary  and  a  Pedlar,"  is  nothing  more 
than  an  amusing  series  of  speeches  by  the  four  imper- 
sonators, in  which  they  vaunt  their  several  callings,  make 
themselves  out  very  arrant  rascals  indeed,  and  by  so 
doing  satirize  the  society  which  they  represent.  The 
Interludes,  as  a  whole,  afford  a  curious  illustration  of 
the  growing  intellectual  curiosity  of  the  Renaissance,  as 
well  as  of  the  popular  devotion  to  the  dramatic  form. . 

Besides  the  Mysteries,  Miracle  Plays,  Moralities,  and 
Interludes,  there  were  several  sorts  of  plays  of  popular 

origin:  wooing-plays  and  other  jigs  derived 
other  from  ancient  folk-customs;  Robin  Hood  plays 

Plays"  derived  from   the  ballads;   sword-plays  and 

dances;  and  Christmas  plays,  or  "mum- 
mings,"  faint  survivals  of  primitive  pagan  religious  cere- 
monies dating  almost  from  the  very  infancy  of  the  human 
race,  and  still  surviving  in  remote  corners  of  England,  as 
may  be  learned  from  the  charming  account  given  in 
Thomas  Hardy's  Return  of  the  Native. 

Influences  affecting  the  composition  of  plays  as  well 
othw  as  the  costuming  and  staging  of  them  flowed 

influences.       a^so    fr°m    sources    not    strictly    dramatic. 

From  a  very  remote  period,  Christmas  and 
other  great  festival  seasons  and  occasions  had  been  cele- 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE         III 

brated  by  elaborate  and  richly  costumed  disguisings,  pro- 
cessions, tournaments,  and  other  similar  spectacles.  As 
time  passed  these  became  more  and  more  dramatic  and 
in  turn  exercised  a  more  and  more  powerful  influence, 
direct  and  indirect,  upon  the  drama  and  the  stage. 

In  addition  to  these  native  elements  in  the  formation 
of  the  drama,  there  was  an  important  influence  from 
without.  This  influence  was  classical,  and 
came  from  the  great  revival  of  interest  in  The  Classicai 
Latin  literature,  which  marked  the  beginning  comedy, 
of  the  Renaissance.  It  became  the  fashion 
in  the  sixteenth  century  for  schoolmasters  to  present  the 
comedies  of  Terence  and  Plautus  on  the  stages  of  gram- 
mar schools,  with  the  students  as  actors.  Before  1541 
Nicholas  Udall,  head  master  of  Eton,  wrote  for  his  boys 
a  play,  modelled  after  Plautus,  called  Ralph  Roister  Doi- 
ster,  the  first  regular  English  comedy.  The  importance 
of  Ralph  Roister  Doister,  in  furnishing  English  playwrights 
with  an  example  of  rapid  dialogue  and  clear  construction 
of  plot,  can  hardly  be  overestimated.  The  play  is,  how- 
ever, an  artificial  production,  with  very  little  local  color, 
or  truth  to  English  life.  The  next  notable  comedy,  Gam- 
mer Gurton's  Needle,  is  supposed  to  have  been  written  by 
William  Stevenson  about  1560.  Here  the  Latin  model  is 
still  followed  in  formal  particulars,  but  the  main  charac- 
ters are  manifestly  studied  from  real  sixteenth-century 
peasants,  and  the  background  of  English  village  life  is 
given  with  much  vivid  realism.  Gammer  Gurton's  Needle 
is  a  great  landmark  in  the  history  of  the  drama  in  Eng- 
land, for  it  shows  that  English  comedy  had  been  able 
to  learn  from  classical  models  the  lesson  of  clear  construc- 
tion and  steady  development  of  plot,  without  sacrificing 
that  broad  and  realistic  comic  spirit  which  had  found 
expression  in  the  byplay  of  the  Mysteries  and  Moralities, 
and  which  was  shortly  to  come  to  flower  in  such  master- 
pieces of  pure  English  humor  as  Dekker's  Shoemakers' 


112  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Holiday,  and  the  tavern  scenes  in  Shakespeare's  Henry 

IV. 

Upon  tragedy  the  classical  influence  was  even  greater, 
and  the  struggle  on  the  part  of  the  learned  playwrights 
of  the  universities  to  impose  the  classical 
The  Classical  form  upon  English  tragedy  was  more  sus- 
Tnragedy?:  tained.  The  classic  dramatist  selected  for 
emulation  was  Seneca.  Between  1560  and 
1581  ten  tragedies  of  Seneca  were  freely  translated. 
Coming  into  the  hands  of  English  playwrights,  just  when 
they  were  eagerly  but  blindly  feeling  their  way  toward 
a  national  type  of  drama,  these  plays  could  not  fail  to 
impress  them  much,  perhaps  all  the  more  because  the 
Senecan  tragedy  was  directly  opposed  to  that  kind  of 
drama  to  which  the  English  people  naturally  inclined. 
Seneca's  plays  have  very  little  stage  action;  important 
events,  instead  of  being  directly  represented,  are  merely 
reported  on  the  stage,  by  messengers  or  others.  The 
tendency  of  English  tragedy,  on  the  other  hand,  was 
from  the  first  to  present  everything  bodily  on  the  stage, 
even  the  storming  of  cities,  or  battles  between  great 
armies,  where  the  means  at  the  disposal  of  the  actors 
were  laughably  inadequate  to  the  demand.  Latin  drama, 
again,  is  usually  careful  to  preserve  unity  of  time  and 
place,  that  is,  to  make  all  the  action  pass  in  a  given 
locality,  and  to  cover  no  more  than  the  events  of  a  single 
day.  English  playwrights,  on  the  contrary,  had  no  hesi- 
tation in  shifting  the  scene  to  half  a  dozen  different 
countries  in  the  course  of  a  single  play;  and  they  thought 
nothing  of  introducing  in  the  first  act  a  child  who  grew 
to  manhood  in  the  second  act,  and  in  the  third  died  and 
handed  on  the  story,  to  be  acted  out  by  his  sons  in  the 
fourth  and  fifth.  Classic  drama  also  drew  a  very  sharp 
line  between  comedy  and  tragedy,  admitting  no  comic 
element  into  a  serious  play.  The  English  drama,  on  the 
contrary,  from  the  miracle  plays  down,  set  comedy  side 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE        113 

by  side  with  tragedy;  it  mingled  the  farcical  with  the 
august,  the  laughable  with  the  pathetic,  as  they  actually 
are  mingled  in  life. 

The  young  university  "wits"  (as  men  of  intellectual 
pretensions  were  then  called),  while  they  shared  in  the 
national  enthusiasm  for  stage-plays,  were 
many  of  them  repelled  by  the  crudities  and 
absurdities  of  the  native  drama,  emphasized  as  these 
were  by  the  meagre  stage-setting.  They  wished,  there- 
fore, to  force  the  elegant  but  cold  Senecan  model  upon 
the  public.  In  1562  two  young  gentlemen  of  the  Inner 
Temple,  Thomas  Norton  and  Thomas  Sackville,  pre- 
sented before  Queen  Elizabeth  a  play  in  blank  verse 
called  Gorboduc,  or  Ferrex  and  Porrex,  which  was  accepted 
as  a  kind  of  manifesto  on  the  part  of  the  classicists,  and 
as  an  example  of  what  could  be  done  in  handling  a  sub- 
ject from  British  legend,  on  the  lines  laid  down  by  Seneca. 
Gorboduc  has  a  chorus,  made  up  of  four  old  men  of  Brit- 
ain; messengers  to  report  the  action,  almost  all  of  which 
takes  place  off  the  stage;  and  long  epic  and  lyric  passages 
— what  the  French  call  tirades— to  take  the  place  of  stage 
action.  It  is  a  stately  production,  and  deserves  venera- 
tion as  the  first  regular  tragedy  written  in  English.  That 
it  had  a  great  influence  upon  the  native  drama,  just 
struggling  into  consciousness  of  itself,  is  evidenced  by 
the  continual  efforts  made  by  the  playwrights  of  the  next 
twenty  or  thirty  years,  to  force  their  stubborn,  overgrown 
material  into  some  semblance  of  the  neat  classic  form. 

In  the  end  the  native  form  won  the  day.     It  had 
on  its  side  not  only  long  tradition,  but  the  overwhelm- 
ing   weight    of    popular   taste.      It   was    in- 
finitely better  suited  to  the  robust  imagina- 
tion  of  the  men  of  the  English  Renaissance,     influence, 
eager  for  excitement  and  craving  strong  sen- 
sations.    Nevertheless,    the    apprenticeship    of    English 
playwrights  to  a  foreign  master,  brief  and  incomplete 


114  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

though  it  was,  was  invaluable.  It  taught  them  to  impose 
some  restraint  upon  the  riot  of  their  fancy;  it  showed 
them  the  beauty  and  artistic  necessity  of  good  structure; 
in  a  word,  it  brought  form  out  of  chaos.  Nor  did  the 
influence  wholly  die,  even  when  the  battle  had  gone  once 
for  all  in  favor  of  the  "romantic"  drama.  Marlowe, 
whose  genius  was  intensely  romantic,  shows  abundant 
traces  of  it;  and  the  ''Chorus"  of  King  Henry  V,  Romeo 
and  Juliet,  and  Pericles,  is  a  slender  remnant  of  the 
Senecan  chorus.  Ben  Jonson,  with  a  haughty  disregard 
for  popular  applause,  continued  to  wage  a  single-handed 
battle  in  favor  of  classicism,  from  the  beginning  of  his 
career  until  twenty  years  after  Shakespeare's  death,  when 
the  Elizabethan  drama  was  drawing  near  the  end  of  its 
magnificent  course. 

We  now  stand  on  the  threshold  of  that  wonderful  sixty 

years  (1580-1640)  during  which  this  course  was  run.     As 

has  been  shown  in  the  last  chapter,  England 

The  Great        found  herself,  at  the  beginning  of  this  period, 

Dramatic  .  , 

Period.  quickened  by  three  of  the  most  potent  influ- 

ences which  can  affect  the  life  of  a  nation: 
wide-spread  intellectual  curiosity,  the  beginnings  of  an 
intense  religious  ferment,  and  the  pride  of  suddenly  dis- 
covered national  strength.  The  young  wits  who  came 
up  from  the  universities  to  London,  tingling  with  the 
imaginative  excitement  of  the  age,  seized  upon  the  popu- 
lar theatre,  crude  though  it  then  was,  as  promising  to 
make  possible  a  form  of  art  concrete  enough,  flexible 
enough,  exciting  enough,  to  satisfy  the  life  of  the  day 
with  a  reflection  of  its  own  diversity  and  splendor.  The 
marvellously  swift  and  many-sided  dramatic  develop- 
ment of  the  next  thirty  years  (1580-1610)  abundantly 
testifies  to  the  sound  instinct  of  the  men  who  saw  in  the 
theatre  the  best  instrument  for  the  expression  of  their 
swarming  fancies. 
The  Elizabethan  drama  has  been  called  "the  drama 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE         115 

of  rhetoric,"  and  from  one  point  of  view  the  descrip- 
tion is  exact.  Not  only  were  dramatists  compelled  by  the 
meagre  stage-setting  to  indulge  in  long  pas- 
sages of  description  and  soliloquy,  butalso  they 
loved  rhetoric  for  its  own  sake,  as  did  their 
audiences.  Nothing  is  more  curious  to  our  modern  ears 
than  the  endless  quibble  and  word-play,  the  elaborate 
conceits,  the  sounding  and  far-fetched  phrase,  in  which 
all  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  and  Shakespeare  as  much 
as  any,  delighted  to  clothe  their  thought.  Lyly's  Euphues 
(see  page  84)  had  a  marked  influence  upon  the  early 
Elizabethan  drama,  both  for  good  and  evil.  The  taste 
for  artificial  language  which  it  reflected  and  fostered, 
filled  the  early  drama  with  passages  which  are  intolerably 
mannered;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  it  refined  poetic 
diction,  and  saved  the  drama  from  the  rudeness  by 
which  a  form  of  art  so  popular  in  its  appeal  and  so  hum- 
ble in  its  origin  was  naturally  threatened. 

As  a  dramatist  Lyly  occupies  a  peculiar  position  among 
Shakespeare's  predecessors.  He  wrote,  not  for  the  regu- 
lar dramatic  companies,  but  for  companies  of 
child  actors.  These  were  choir-boys,  one  JjJcSd 
company  attached  to  Saint  Paul's  Cathedral  Actors, 
and  known  as  the  ''Children  of  Paul's,"  the 
other  attached  to  the  Queen's  chapel  at  Whitehall  and 
known  as  the  "  Children  of  the  Chapel  Royal."  To  these 
child  companies  Lyly's  tone  and  matter  were  admirably 
adapted.  His  plays  are  for  the  most  part  graceful  adap- 
tations of  classic  myths,  so  turned  as  to  have  a  bearing 
upon  some  contemporary  happening  at  court,  yet  moving 
always  in  an  atmosphere  of  quaint  and  dream-like  unreal- 
ity. Endymion  is  an  elaborate  compliment  to  Queen 
Elizabeth,  who  appears  in  the  play  in  the  character  of 
Cynthia,  the  virgin  huntress.  The  Woman  in  the  Moon 
is  a  veiled  satire  upon  women  in  general,  and  Elizabeth 
in  particular,  written  after  Lyly  had  been  soured  by 


Il6  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

years  of  fruitless  seeking  after  court  favor.  Through  the 
plays  are  scattered  delightful  lyrics,  which  Lyly  was  per- 
haps especially  tempted  to  insert  by  the  clear  voices  of 
the  child  players. 

The  child  actors  for  whom  Lyly  wrote,  played  at  first 
exclusively  in  private — at  court,  or  in  the  houses  of  the 
nobility.  But  the  regular  companies  had 
already  begun  to  establish  themselves  in  the 
and  Their  suburbs  of  London,  and  to  erect  permanent 
theatres.  The  first  of  these  playhouses, 
known  simply  as  "The  Theatre,"  was  built  in  Finsbury 
Fields,  to  the  north  of  the  city,  by  James  Burbage,  in 
1576.  It  was  at  this  playhouse  that  Shakespeare  first 
found  employment.  Burbage's  company,  on  the  de- 
struction of  The  Theatre,  built  the  Globe,  on  the  south 
bank  of  the  Thames;  and  here,  on  the  Bankside,  other 
places  of  theatrical  entertainment  rapidly  sprang  up. 
Burbage  built  the  Blackfriars  as  a  winter  theatre  within 
the  city  limits.  By  the  end  of  the  century  eleven  thea- 
tres existed  in  the  city  and  in  the  free  lands  or  "liberties" 
adjoining. 

Performances  took  place  usually  at  three  in  the  after- 
noon, and  were  announced  by  the  hanging  out  of  a  flag 

Presentation  and  the  blowing  of  trumpets.  The  theatres 
o/an  were  round  or  octagonal  structures,  unroofed 

Elizabethan  except  for  a  shed  or  canopy  over  the  stage. 
(The  winter  theatres,  such  as  the  Blackfriars, 
were  entirely  roofed  in.)  The  stage  extended  out  into 
the  body  of  the  house,  was  open  on  three  sides,  and  was 
sufficiently  elevated  so  that  the  main  bulk  of  the  audi- 
ence, standing  on  the  bare  ground  which  formed  the 
floor  or  pit  of  the  theatre,  could  have  a  fair  view.  Per- 
sons who  could  afford  to  pay  a  higher  price  than  the 
"groundlings"  took  advantage  of  the  boxes  built  round 
the  pit;  and  young  gallants,  for  an  extra  fee,  could  have 
seats  upon  the  stage  itself,  where  they  smoked  their  pipes, 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE        117 

peeled  oranges,  cracked  nuts,  and  often  interfered  with 
the  performance  by  chaffing  a  poor  actor,  or  by  flirting 
ostentatiously  with  the  fair  occupant  of  a  neighboring 
box.  In  accordance  with  the  luxurious  taste  of  the  age 
in  dress,  the  costumes  of  the  actors  were  often  very  rich. 
All  women's  parts  were  played  by  boys;  actresses  were 
not  seen  in  England  until  after  the  Restoration.  It  was 
long  thought  that  the  Elizabethans  were  practically  with- 
out stage-setting,  a  change  of  scene  being  indicated  often 
merely  by  a  placard,  or  by  a  roughly  painted  piece  of 
pasteboard  and  a  few  stage  properties.  Although  this 
view  proves  to  have  been  exaggerated,  it  is  true  that  the 
dramatist  was  compelled,  to  a  far  greater  degree  than  at 
present,  to  rely  upon  vivid  poetic  expression  as  the  chief 
means  of  stimulating  the  imagination  of  his  audience 
and  of  preserving  the  dramatic  illusion. 

While  Lyly  was  at  the  height  of  his  vogue,  during  the 
late  eighties  of  the  sixteenth  century,  a  group  of  young 
dramatists  were  coming  to  the  front  whose  appeal  was 
not  to  the  court  but  to  the  people,  and  whose  plays  were 
written  for  the  popular  theatres  just  described.  The 
most  important  of  these  dramatists  were  Christopher 
Marlowe,  Robert  Greene,  and  George  Peele,  with  Mar- 
lowe the  undisputed  leader.  The  non-dramatic  work  of 
these  men  has  already  been  mentioned  (see  pages  90  and 
98).  Greene  was  by  natural  gift  a  prose  romancer,  Peele 
a  lyric  poet,  and  at  least  half  of  Marlowe's  genius  was  of 
an  epic  kind.  But  the  tendency  of  the  age  was  so  over- 
whelmingly in  favor  of  drama  that  all  three,  in  com- 
mon with  many  of  their  fellows,  were  diverted  into  the 
channel  of  dramatic  expression;  and  Marlowe  achieved 
in  this  not  wholly  sympathetic  medium  all  but  the  high- 
est distinction. 

Christopher  Marlowe  (1564-1593),  one  of  the  most 
striking  figures  of  the  English  Renaissance,  is  the  true 
founder  of  the  popular  English  drama,  though  he  was 


Il8  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

himself  an  outgrowth  of  the  long  period  of  preparation 
which  we  have  been  traversing.  He  was  born  in  1564, 
two  months  before  Shakespeare,  in  the  old 
cathedral  town  of  Canterbury.  His  father 
was  a  shoemaker;  the  boy  was  sent  to  Cam- 
bridge by  a  patron,  who  had  noticed  his  quick  parts.  He 
graduated  at  nineteen;  and  four  years  later  (1587)  he 
astonished  London  with  his  first  play,  T amburlaine ,  which 
he  brought  out  with  the  Lord  Admiral's  Men,  the  rival 
company  to  the  Lord  Chamberlain's  Men,  whom  Shake- 
speare joined. 

•    In  the  brief  and  haughty  prologue  prefixed  to  Tambur- 

His  "Pro-       laine,  Marlowe   not  only  announced  clearly 

the  character  of  that  play,  but  hinted  at  the 

programme  which  he  proposed  to  carry  out  in  the  future: 

From  jigging  veins  of  rhyming  mother  wits 
And  such  conceits  as  clownage  keeps  in  pay, 
We'll  lead  you  to  the  stately  tents  of  war 
Where  you  shall  hear  the  Scythian  Tamburlaine 
Threatening  the  world  with  high  astounding  terms 
And  scourging  kingdoms  with  his  conquering  sword. 

The  "jigging  veins  of  rhyming  mother  wits"  is  a  sneer  at 
the  use  of  rhyme  and  awkward  tumbling  lines  of  four- 
teen syllables,,  which  was  customary  with  the  popular 
playwrights  of  the  time.  For  this  " jigging  vein"  he 
proposes  to  substitute  blank  verse,  which,  though  it  had 
been  employed  since  the  example  of  Sackville  and  Nor- 
ton, in  Gorboduc,  had  not  fully  established  itself.  It  is  a 
sign  of  Marlowe's  artistic  insight  that  he  should  have 
recognized  at  once  the  value  of  blank  verse  for  dramatic 
poetry;  and  we  can  see,  beneath  the  surface  of  his  words, 
a  proud  consciousness  of  his  own  power  over  this  almost 
untried  form  of  verse.  Out  of  it  he  built  that  "mighty 
line  which  astounded  and  fascinated  his  contemporaries; 
and  his  success  with  it  fixed  it  firmly  as  the  vehicle  of  seri- 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE        119 

ous  drama  henceforth.  By  his  sneer  at  the  "conceits" 
that  "clownage  keeps  in  pay,"  Marlowe  showed  his  de- 
termination not  to  pander  to  the  pit  by  means  of  vulgar 
comedy  and  horse-play,  but  to  treat  an  elevated  theme 
with  seriousness.  By  the  "stately  tents  of  war,"  to 
which  he  promises  to  lead  his  hearer,  he  typified  the  dig- 
nity and  largeness  of  'scope  which  he  proposed  to  give  to 
all  his  work.  By  the  last  three  lines  of  the  prologue  he 
foreshadowed  his  plan  of  giving  unity  to  his  dramas  by 
making  them  revolve  around  some  single  great  person- 
ality, engaged  in  some  titanic  struggle  for  power;  and 
likewise  of  treating  this  struggle  with  the  rhetorical  splen- 
dor, the  "high  astounding  terms,"  without  which  Eliza- 
bethan drama  is  now  inconceivable.  This  programme  he 
carried  out  in  the  main  with  consistency. 

Tamburlaine  is  a  pure  "hero-play."  The  Scythian 
shepherd  conquers,  one  after  another,  the  kingdoms  of 
the  East,  forcing  kings  to  harness  themselves 
to  his  chariot,  and  carrying  with  him  a  great 
cage  in  which  a  captive  emperor  is  kept  like 
a  wild  beast.  The  huge  barbaric  figure  of  Tamburlaine  is 
always  before  our  eyes,  and  the  action  of  the  play  is  only 
a  series  of  his  triumphs.  His  character,  half-bestial,  half- 
godlike  in  its  remorseless  strength  and  confidence,  domi- 
•  nates  the  imagination  like  an  elemental  force  of  nature, 
and  lends  itself  admirably  to  those  "high  astounding 
terms"  which  fill  whole  pages  of  the  play  with  thunderous 
monologue. 

Marlowe's  second  work,  Doctor  Faustus,  is  also  a  hero- 
play,  and  is  cast  on  even  larger  lines.  It  is  a  dramatized 
story  of  the  life  and  death  of  a  mediaeval 
scholar,  who  sells  his  soul  to  the  devil,  in 
return  for  a  life  of  power  and  pleasure.  It 
embodied,  in  another  form,  the  same  aspiration  after  the 
unattainable  which  Tamburlaine  had  typified;  and  the 
story  involved  large  questions  of  human  will  and  fate, 


120  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

such  as  an  imagination  like  Marlowe's  loves  to  grapple 
with.  It  can  hardly  be  said  that  the  poet  lived  up  to 
the  possibilities  of  his  subject.  The  play,  as  it  has  come 
down  to  us,  is  disfigured  by  comic  passages  of  a  coarse 
and  tasteless  sort,  those  very  "  conceits  of  clownage" 
which  Marlowe  had  formerly  declared  war  against.  But 
even  where  the  workmanship  is  poor,  there  is  always 
something  imposing  in  the  design;  and  certain  passages 
have  hardly  been  surpassed  for  power  and  beauty.  When 
Mephistopheles  raises  from  the  dead  the  spirit  of  Helen 
of  Troy,  Faustus  utters  one  rapturous  exclamation: 

Was  this  the  face  that  launched  a  thousand  ships 
And  burnt  the  topless  towers  of  llion? 

And  at  his  death  he  starts  up  with  the  cry, 

Lo,  where  Christ's  blood  streams  in  the  firmament ! — 

three  lines  which  would  alone  serve  to  stamp  Marlowe 
as  of  the  company  of  imperial  poets. 

Marlowe's  third  play,  The  Jew  of  Malta,  is  again  a 
study  of  the  lust  of  power — this  time  the  power  bestowed 

by  great  riches.  Barabbas,  the  old  Jewish 
Sa»eMdf  mercnant  °f  Malta,  is  the  first  vigorous 
"Edward  ii.»  sketch  of  which  Shakespeare  was  to  make  in- 

Shylock  a  finished  masterpiece.  The  first 
two  acts  are  conceived  on  a  large  scale,  and  carefully 
worked  out;  but  after  these  Marlowe  seems  again  to  have 
fallen  from  his  own  ideal,  and  to  have  worked  hastily  and 
insincerely.  Raw  horrors  accumulate  on  horror's  head, 
and  the  play  degenerates  into  melodrama  of  the  goriest 
kind.  Nevertheless,  it  shows  a  remarkable  advance 
over  Tamburlaine  and  Doctor  Faustus,  in  the  knitting 
together  of  cause  and  effect.  Marlowe's  growth  in  dra- 
matic technic  is  still  more  strikingly  apparent  in  his 
last  play,  Edward  II.  This  is  unquestionably  his  mas- 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE        121 

terpiece,  so  far  as  play-making  goes,  though  for  the  very 
reason  that  it  discards  rhetorical  monologue  for  the  rapid 
dramatic  interchange  of  thought,  it  contains  fewer  quot- 
able passages  of  pure  poetry  than  any  of  the  others. 
Edward  II  is  an  example  of  a  form  of  drama  which  be- 
came very  popular — the  chronicle  history.  It  served  as 
a  kind  of  text-book  for  a  nation  curious  as  to  its  pastr 
and  seeking  therein  lessons  for  its  future  guidance.  One- 
of  the  dangers  most  present  to  the  mind  of  Englishmen 
of  the  sixteenth  century  was  that  of  civil  war;  one  of  the 
themes  most  constantly  fascinating  to  the  Renaissance 
mind  was  that  of  man  highly  placed  in  power,  suddenly 
thrust  down  to  misery  and  death.  To  these  two  facts 
we  can  attribute  the  interest  of  Marlowe  and  later  of 
Shakespeare  in  the  reigns  of  Edward  II,  Richard  II, 
Henry  VI,  and  Richard  III. 

Marlowe  was  killed  in  1593,  at  the  age  of  twenty-nine. 
There  is  something  in  the  meteor-like  suddenness  of  his 
appearance  in  the  skies  of  poetry,  and  in  the  swift  flaming 
of  his  genius  through  its  course,  that  seems  to  make  in- 
evitable his  violent  end.  He  sums  up  for  us  the  Renais- 
sance passion  for  life,  sleepless  in  its  search  and  daring  in 
its  grasp  after  the  infinite  in  power,  in  knowledge,  and  in 
pleasure. 

A  dramatist  of  whom  little  is  known,  but  who  is  im- 
portant as  representing  a  type  of  drama  which  had  great 
influence,  is    Thomas    Kyd.     His   plays   Je- 
ronimo  and  The  Spanish  Tragedy,  acted  about          Kyd 
1592,  are  examples  of  what  came  to  be  called 
"the    tragedy    of   blood."     They   constitute   a    sort    of 
double  play,  in  the  first  part  of  which  the  hero  is  slain, 
but  in  the  second  part  returns  to  inspire  the  revenge 
which  ultimately  results  in  the  death  of  nearly  all  the 
other  characters.     Traces  of  this  type  of  play  may  be 
seen  in   Shakespeare's  Hamlet  and  Julius  Ccesqr.     The 
appetite  for  crude  bloodshed  was  persistent  in  Elizabethan 


122  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

audiences,  and  popular  dramatists,  in  gratifying  them, 
seem  to  have  had  a  certain  effrontery  in  defying  the  con- 
ventions of  the  classical  drama  in  which  untoward  events 
take  place  off  the  stage. 

Robert  Greene  was  probably  encouraged  to  write  for 
the    stage    by    Marlowe's    success    with    Tamburlaine. 

Greene's  best  plays  are  Friar  Bacon  and  Friar 
Greece.  Bungay  and  James  IV.  The  first  of  these 

has  some  country  scenes,  grouped  about  the 
character  of  Margaret,  the  fair  maid  of  Fressingfield, 
which  are  in  a  fine  healthy  English  tone.  James  IV  has 
a  clear  and  coherent  development,  unusual  at  this  stage 
of  the  drama;  one  of  its  motifs,  that  of  the  persecuted 
woman  who  flees  to  the  forest  in  the  disguise  of  a  page., 
was  destined  to  become  immensely  popular  in  the  latex 
romantic  drama,  and  to  be  used  over  and  over  again, 
with  endless  variations,  by  Shakespeare  and  Fletcher. 

George  Peele,  like  Greene,  began  his  career  by  non- 
dramatic  writing.     His  most  characteristic   early  work 

consists  of  poems  written  for  ceremonial  occa- 

PeS?"  sions-     One   of   these>    "A   Farewell    to    the 

Famous  and  Fortunate  Generals  of  our  Eng- 
lish Forces,"  written  on  the  departure  of  Drake  and  Nor- 
ris,  on  the  expedition  to  Portugal  in  1589,  is  full  of  the 
new  national  spirit.  Some  of  the  lines  have  a  superb  ring 
of  exultation  and  pride: 

You  fight  for  Christ  and  England's  peerless  queen, 
Elizabeth  the  wonder  of  the  world, 
Over  whose  throne  the  enemies  of  God 

Have  thundered 

O  ten  times  treble  happy  men,  that  fight 
Under  the  cross  of  Christ  and  England's  queen ! 

This  passage  well  illustrates  Peele's  peculiar  gift  as  a 
poet,  that  of  making  his  lines  kindle  as  they  go.  His  best 
play,  David  and  Bethsabe,  is,  considered  merely  as  a 


THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE         1 23 

play,  poor  enough;  but  it  is  full  of  passages,  usually  only 
a  few  b'nes  long,  which  seem  to  take  fire  before  a  reader's 
eyes,  and  to  burn  with  the  softest  yet  most  intense  flame 
of  the  imagination.  David  and  Bethsabe  may  be  regarded 
as  a  late  type  of  the  mystery  play,  stripped  of  its  sacred 
significance,  and  saturated  with  the  sensuous  grace  and 
rich  color  of  the  Renaissance.  Another  play  of  Peek's, 
The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  is  notable  as  having  furnished  Milton 
with  the  groundwork  of  Comus.  It  is  a  very  crude  but 
a  very  charming  play;  a  sort  of  dramatized  nursery- tale 
of  giants,  bewitched  maidens,  buried  lamps,  and  magic 
wells,  put  forth  with  the  occasional  poetic  grace  and  the 
•limless  dreamy  digression  proper  to  the  species. 

Peele  was  out  of  place  in  drama,  and  never  succeeded 
in  writing  a  really  good  play.  But  his  contribution  to 
the  development  of  dramatic  style  was  nevertheless  great. 
He  succeeded  in  keeping  much  of  the  strength  of  Mar- 
lowe's "  mighty  line,"  while  infusing  into  it  a  new  tender- 
ness and  soft  play  of  color.  If  Marlowe  furnished  the 
strength,  Peele  as  surely  furnished  the  sweetness,  which 
went  to  make  up  the  incomparable  blend  of  Elizabethan 
•drama  at  its  great  moment. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  RENAISSANCE:  SHAKESPEARE 

WILLIAM  SHAKESPEARE  was  born  on  or  about  the  23d 
of  April,  1564,  in  the  village  of  Stratford.     He  was  the 
third  child  of  John  Shakespeare  and  Mary 
Shake-  Arden.     His  mother  was  of  gentle  blood,  and 

EariJe>Life.  was  possessed  of  some  wealth  by  inheritance. 
His  father,  though  a  man  of  consideration  in 
the  village,  was  of  lower  station,  a  dealer  in  various 
goods — corn,  wool,  meat,  and  leather.  Until  the  age  of 
fourteen  the  boy  attended  the  Stratford  grammar-school, 
where  he  picked  up  the  "small  Latin  and  less  Greek,"  to 
which  his  immensely  learned  friend  Ben  Jonson  rather 
scornfully  refers.  The  better  part  of  his  education,  a 
wonderfully  deep  and  sure  insight  into  nature,  and  a 
wide  acquaintance  with  the  folk-lore  of  his  native  district, 
he  doubtless  began  to  acquire  in  boyhood,  by  rambles 
through  the  meadows  and  along  the  streams  of  Warwick- 
shire, stopping  to  chat  with  old  crones  over  their  cottage 
fires,  or  to  listen  to  plowmen  as  they  took  their  noon- 
ing. Only  a  few  miles  away  was  the  picturesque  town 
of  Warwick,  with  its  magnificent  castle,  to  set  him  dream- 
ing of  the  past.  Within  an  easy  day's  walk  lay  Kenil- 
worth  Castle,  the  seat  of  Elizabeth's  favorite,  Leicester; 
and  the  historic  town  of  Coventry,  where  one  might  still 
see  mystery  plays  performed  on  certain  festival  days. 
Travelling  companies  of  actors  visited  Stratford  two  or 
three  times  a  year,  and  had  to  apply  to  Shakespeare's 
father  for  leave  to  play.  At  their  performances  young 
Shakespeare  was  doubtless  sometimes  present,  drinking 
124 


SHAKESPEARE  125 

in  his  first  impressions  of  the  fascinating  world  of  the 
stage.  In  these  and  other  ways  his  mind  found  the  food 
it  needed;  and  stored  up  many  a  brave  image,  which  it 
should  afterward  evoke  in  the  thick  air  of  a  crowded  Lon- 
don theatre. 

About  1578  the  fortunes  of  his  father  began  to  decline, 
and  Shakespeare  was  withdrawn  from  school.     In  spite 
of  the  rapidly  failing  prosperity  of  the  family, 
he  was  married  at  eighteen  to  Ann  Hath-        Shake- 

.  i-  ,  .  .  speare's 

away,  a  young  woman  eight  years  his  senior,  Marriage, 
the  daughter  of  a  peasant  family  of  Shottery, 
near  Stratford.  That  the  marriage  was  hasty  and  un- 
fortunate has  been  conjectured  from  the  general  course 
of  Shakespeare's  life,  as  well  as  from  various  passages  in 
the  plays,  which  seem  to  have  an  autobiographic  color. 
Certain  it  is  that  some  time  between  1585  and  1587  he 
left  Stratford  to  seek  his  fortune  in  the  capital,  and  that 
until  the  later  years  of  his  life  he  returned  to  his  native 
town  only  at  rare  intervals.  The  immediate  cause  of  his 
leaving  is  said  by  doubtful  tradition  to  have  been  the 
anger  of  Sir  Thomas  Lucy,  a  local  magnate,  over  a  deer- 
stealing  prank  in  which  Shakespeare  and  other  wild  young 
blades  of  the  village  had  engaged. 

Outside  the  walls  of  London  to  the  north,  not  far  from 
where  the  road  from  Shakespeare's  country  entered  the 
purlieus  of  the  capital,  stood  the  oldest  of  the 
London  playhouses,  called  simply  The  Thea-     in  London.1 
tre.     It  had  at  the  head  of  its  company  the 
famous  actor  James  Burbage.     Whether  from  accident 
or  set  intention,   Shakespeare  soon  found  himself  con- 
nected with  Burbage's  company,  where  he  made  himself 
indispensable  as  actor  and  as  retoucher  of  old  plays.     He 
continued  with  Burbage's  company,  as  actor,  playwright, 
and  stockholder,  when  The  Theatre  was  pulled  down, 
and  rebuilt  as  the  Globe  on  the  south  bank  of  the  Thames. 

Of  the  external  facts  of  Shakespeare's  life  in  London  we 


126  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

know  few,  and  those  few  of  small  importance.  We  know 
of  his  friendship  with  the  Earl  of  Southampton;  of  his 
friendly  rivalry,  in  art  and  talk,  with  "rare  Ben  Jonson," 
the  second  dramatist  of  the  age;  of  his  careful  conduct  of 
his  business  affairs,  and  of  his  popularity  as  a  playwright. 
Except  for  these  few  gleams  of  light,  his  external  life  is 
wrapped  in  mystery;  and  the  very  breadth  and  dramatic 
greatness  of  his  plays  prevent  us  from  drawing  any  but  the 
broadest  inferences  concerning  his  personal  history. 

The  foundation  of  Shakespeare's  modest  fortune  is 
thought  to  have  been  laid  by  a  gift  from  his  friend  and 

patron,  the  young  Earl  of  Southampton,  to 
His  Return  whom  he  dedicated  his  youthful  poems,  Venus 
his  Death*  '  and  Adonis  and  Lucrece;  but  it  was  mainly 

by  his  earnings  at  the  Globe  and  Blackfriars 
theatres  that  he  was  able  to  reinstate  his  parents  in  their 
old  position  of  burgherly  comfort,  and  to  gain  for  himself 
a  patent  of  gentility  and  the  possession  of  the  best  home  • 
stead  in  his  native  village,  with  broad  acres  of  land  to 
add  to  its  dignity.  Hither,  at  the  age  of  fifty,  he  retired, 
to  spend  the  remainder  of  his  life  in  country  quietude, 
with  his  wife  and  his  unmarried  daughter,  Judith.  He 
died  in  1616,  at  the  age  of  fifty-two;  and  was  buried  in 
the  old  church  by  the  Avon,  where  thousands  of  pilgrim* 
now  go  each  year  to  read  the  words  on  his  tomb,  beseech- 
ing men  to  let  his  dust  lie  quiet  in  its  grave. 

The  exact  dates  of  production  of  Shakespeare's  plays 
are  often  uncertain.  The  publication  followed  sometimes 
The  Dates  of  ^Y  years  the  first  appearance  on  the  stage, 
Shake-  and  only  sixteen  of  the  thirty-seven  were  pub- 

lished  in  Shakespeare's  lifetime.     Sometimes 

there  is  external  evidence  in  the  form  of  a 
reference  to  the  play  in  some  contemporary  document,  or 
a  reference  in  the  text  of  the  play  to  some  contemporary 
event  or  publication.  There  are  certain  peculiarities  in 
Shakespeare's  style  which  tend  to  indicate  the  period  of 


SHAKESPEARE  127 

the  work.  For  example,  Shakespeare  used  rhyme  much 
more  freely  in  his  earlier  plays,  and  his  blank  verse  was 
much  more  rigid.  In  his  later  plays  he  allows  the  thought 
to  run  on  from  one  line  to  the  next,  and  often  concludes 
lines  with  small,  unemphatic  words,  or  admits  extra  syl- 
lables. From  these  various  indications  it  is  possible  to 
make  out  the  chronology  of  Shakespeare's  plays  with 
approximate  accuracy.  Most  critics  divide  his  work  into 
four  periods:  the  first  of  experiment  and  external  influ- 
ence (1590-1594);  the  second  of  mature  power  in  comedy 
and  history  plays  (1595-1601);  the  third  of  satire  and 
tragedy  (1601-1609),  and  the  fourth  of  romance  (1609- 
1611). 

Shakespeare  probably  began  his  dramatic  work,  as  has 
been  said,  by  retouching  old  plays.  The  three  parts  of 
Henry  VI  remain  as  an  interesting  specimen 
of  his  efforts  in  this  direction.  They  also 
t$how  so  clearly  the  influence,  of  Marlowe  that 
it  has  been  conjectured  that  he  and  Shakespeare  worked 
together  on  the  revision  of  the  original  plays.  At  all 
events,  when  Shakespeare  essayed  a  history  play  of  his 
own,  in  Richard  III,  he  produced  a  portrait  of  elemental 
energy  and  evil  pride  which  the  creator  of  Tamburlaine 
and  Faust  might  have  mistaken  for  his  own  handiwork. 
Another  early  play,  Titus  Andronicus,  is  written  in  a 
strain  of  raw  horror  calculated  to  outdo  Marlowe  at  his 
.hardest  and  cruellest,  but  Shakespeare's  part  in  this 
crude  melodrama  is  uncertain.  Before  this,  however,  he 
.had  made  other  experiments  in  quite  different  manners. 
His  earliest  comedy,  Love's  Labour's  Lost,  sprang  from  his 
interest  in  the  fanciful,  artificial  language  to  which  Lyly's 
Euphues  had  given  a  tremendous  vogue  at  Elizabeth's 
court  and  among  all  the  young  fashionables  of  London. 
The  characters  represent  contemporary  types  in  a  style 
of  rhetorical  burlesque.  Shakespeare's  next  play,  the 
Comedy  of  Errors,  was  an  experiment  in  still  another 


128  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

direction.  It  is  an  adaptation  of  a  Latin  comedy,  the 
Menachmi  of  Plautus.  The  farcical  plot  turns  upon  the 
resemblance  of  twin  brothers,  in  whose  service  are  two 
clownish  servants,  also  counterparts  of  each  other. 
Shakespeare  handles  the  intrigue  with  a  skill  which  shows 
how  rapidly  he  was  growing  in  stage  technic.  Instead 
of  following  up  his  success  in  this  kind,  however,  he 
turned  immediately  to  try  a  new  experiment,  in  the  Two 
Gentlemen  of  Verona.  This  is  a  dramatized  romance, 
adapted  freely  from  one  of  the  popular  "novels"  or  love- 
romances  of  his  day.  The  play,  thin  and  youthful  as  it 
is,  has  more  than  a  touch  of  real  Shakespearian  grace. 
The  scene  (Act  II,  sc.  Ill)  in  which  Launce,  the  clown, 
upbraids  his  dog  for  not  joining  in  the  family  distress  at 
his  departure,  is  a  piece  of  glorious  nonsense;  and  the 
famous  lyric,  "Who  is  Silvia?"  is  the  first  of  many  ex- 
quisite songs  which  carry  the  spirit  of  the  plays  into  the 
realm  of  music. 

Shakespeare  had  now  made  rapid  experiments  in  four 
directions:  in  Henry  VI  he  had  essayed  the  chronicle  or 
history  play,  in  Love's  Labour's  Lost  the  "con- 
versation  play,"  in  the  Comedy  of  Errors  the 
classical  comedy,  and  in  Two  Gentlemen  of 
Verona  the  romance.  He  brought  this  first  period  of  his 
work  to  a  close  with  two  more  efforts,  wholly  different  in 
kind  from  the  preceding  and  from  each  other.  These  also 
are  experimental,  in  the  sense  that  they  enter  realms  be- 
fore unknown  to  drama;  but  both  in  conception  and 
execution  they  are  finished  masterpieces.  A  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream  and  Romeo  and  Juliet  show  that  in  several 
directions  Shakespeare  had  now  passed  beyond  his  ap- 
prentice state,  and  had  attained  the  rank  of  master 
craftsman.  The  first  of  these  plays  is  thought  to  have 
been  written  in  1594;  the  second,  though  it  did  not  receive 
its  final  form  until  1596  or  1597,  was  probably  produced 
about  the  same  time. 


SHAKESPEARE  1  29 

A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream  is  thought  to  have  been 
written  for  some  nobleman's  marriage-festival,  to  take 
the  place  of  the  masque  or  allegorical  pageant 
traditional  upon  such  occasions.  Theseus,  "A  Midsum- 
Duke  of  Athens,  and  his  bride  Hippolyta,  in  SSam1." 
whose  lofty  figures  the  noble  bridal  pair  are 
perhaps  shadowed  forth,  represent  the  sentiment  of  love 
in  its  serene  and  lofty  mood.  About  this  central  pair 
revolve  three  other  groups,  representing  love  in  its  fanci- 
ful and  burlesque  aspects.  The  first  group  is  made  up 
of  the  Athenian  youths  and  maidens  astray  in  the  moon- 
light woods,  loving  at  cross-purposes,  and  played  upon 
by  Puck  with  a  magic  liquor,  which  adds  confusion  to 
confusion  in  their  hearts.  The  second  group  consists  of 
the  fairy  Queen  Titania  and  her  lord  Oberon;  and  here 
the  treatment  of  the  love-theme  becomes  deliciously 
satiric,  as  it  depicts  the  passion  of  the  dainty  Queen  for 
Bully  Bottom,  with  the  ass's  head.  In  the  third  group, 
that  of  the  journeymen  actors  who  present  the  "tedious 
brief  scene  of  young  Pyramus  and  his  love  Thisbe:  very 
tragical  mirth,"  the  love-theme  is  modulated  into  the 
most  absurd  burlesque.  Then,  poured  over  all,  holding 
these  diverse  elements  in  unity,  is  the  atmosphere  of  mid- 
summer moonlight,  and  the  aerial  poetry  of  the  fairy 
world. 

A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  like  the  plays  which  pre- 
ceded it,  treats  of  love  in  a  light  and  fanciful  way,  never! 
more  than  half  in  earnest  and  usually  frankly 
trivial.     In  Romeo  and  Juliet  love  ceases  to  0  * 


be  a  mere  sentiment,  to  be  played  with  and 
jested  over;  it  becomes  a  passion,  tragical  with  the  issues 
of  life  and  death.  Here  for  the  first  time  Shakespeare 
was  really  in  earnest.  The  two  young  lives  are  caught 
in  a  fiery  whirlwind,  which  sweeps  them  through  the 
rapturous  hours  of  their  new  love,  to  their  death  together 
in  the  tomb  of  Juliet's  ancestors.  The  action,  instead  of 


130  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

being  spread  over  months,  as  in  the  poem  from  which 
Shakespeare  took  the  plot,  is  crowded  into  five  days;  and 
from  the  first  meeting  of  the  lovers  until  the  end  a  sense 
of  hurry,  now  ecstatic,  now  desperate,  keeps  the  passion 
mounting  in  a  swift  crescendo.  Not  only  is  the  play 
great  as  a  "tragedy  of  fate"  in  the  Greek  sense,  but  in 
the  drawing  of  character  the  poet  now  for  the  first  time 
works  with  unerring  deftness  and  power.  The  vulgar, 
kind-hearted  nurse,  the  witty,  hare-brained  Mercutio,  the 
vacillating  yet  stubborn  Capulet,  the  lovers  themselves, 
so  sharply  differentiated  in  the  manner  of  their  love,  all 
these  and  a  dozen  minor  figures  have  the  very  hue  and 
gesture  of  life. 

To  this  first  period  of  production  belong  also  Shake- 
speare's two  longest  poems,  Venus  and  Adonis  (1593) 
and  The  Rape  of  Lucrcce  (1594),  both  of  which 
s^re^s  were  dedicated  to  his  patron,  the  young  Earl 
Poems.  of  Southampton.  They  are  both  character- 

istic productions  of  the  Renaissance,  classical 
stories  treated  with  an  extravagant  richness  of  decorative 
detail  and  a  frank  sensuousness  for  which  Marlowe  in 
Hero  and  Leander  had  given  the  model. 

Shakespeare's  second  period  is  marked  by  the  success 
with  which  he  threw  into  dramatic  form  the  rough  masses 
Th  of  English  history  which  he  found  in  the 

Period600"  chronicle  of  Holinshed.  In  Richard  II  he 
returned  to  the  subject  of  the  dispute  for  the 
crown  among  the  descendants  of  Edward  III,  and  fol- 
lowed with  three  plays  which  contain  some  of  his  most 
remarkable  work.  These  are  Henry  IV  (in  two  parts) 
and  Henry  V. 

In  planning  Henry  IV,  Shakespeare  followed  the  earlier 
chronicle  plays  by  interspersing  the  somewhat  dry  historic 
matter  with  scenes  from  the  London  tavern  life  of  his 
own  day— a  life  full  of  racy  humors  fitted  to  afford  the 
desired  comic  relief.  As  the  genius  loci  of  the  tavern 


SHAKESPEARE  131 

world,  he  created  Falstaff,  the  fat  old  knight  who  helps 
Prince  Hal  (afterward  King  Henry  V)  to  sow  his  wild  oats. 
The  immortal  figure  of  Falstaff  holds  the  prime 
place   among  the   creations  of  Shakespeare's    "  Henry  iv 
humor,  as  royally  as  Hamlet  holds  his   "intel-     v." 
lectual  throne."     In  Henry   V  we  see  Shake- 
speare in  a  new  and  very  engaging  light;  it  is,  indeed, 
hardly  a  figure  of  speech  to  say  that  we  see  the  poet, 
for  in  this  play,  as  nowhere  else  in  his  dramas,  does  he 
speak  with  the  voice  of  personal  enthusiasm.     The  manly, 
open  character  of  the  King,  and  his  splendid  victories  over 
the  French,  made  him  a  kind  of  symbol  of  England's 
greatness,  both  in  character  and  in  achievement.     The 
poet  transfers  to  the  battle  of  Agincourt  the  national 
pride  which  had  been  kindled  by  the  defeat  of  the  Ar- 
mada;  and  makes  his  play  a  great  paean  of  praise  for 
the  island -kingdom.     In  the  "choruses"  introducing  the 
.several  acts,  and  even  in  the  speeches  of  the  characters 
themselves,  he  utters  in  lyric  strophes  an  overwhelming 
patriotic  emotion. 

The  schooling  through  which  Shakespeare  put  himself 
in  writing  the  English  historical  plays  was  arduous.  He 
had  to  teach  to  the  populace  of  his  time  the 
history  of  their  country;  it  was  therefore  in- 
cumbent  upon  him  to  use  the  material  with-  toricai  Plays 
out  gross  falsification,  and  at  the  same  time  j^^jJJ^. 
to  give  it  life  and  artistic  form.  To  do  this  speare's  Art. 
in  the  strictest  of  all  forms,  the  drama,  and 
with  the  meagre  resources  of  the  Elizabethan  stage,  was 
a  task  which  strengthened  his  art  for  the  work  he  had 
still  to  do;  especially  for  the  four  great  tragedies,  Hamlet, 
Othello,  Macbeth,  and  King  Lear,  which  mark  the  height 
of  his  achievement. 

A  further  advance  in  Shakespeare's  technical  mastery 
is  seen  in  Julius  Gasar,  which  was  first  acted  in  1599. 
This  play,  falling  in  point  of  time  between  the  "histo- 


132  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ries"  and  the  tragedies,  partakes  of  the  character  of  both. 
While  Shakespeare  keeps  faithfully,  even  in  details,  to  the 
story  of  the  assassination  of  Caesar  and  subse- 
quent  events,  as  he  found  it  in  Sir  Thomas 
North's  translation  of  Plutarch  (1579),  he 
gives  to  his  material  a  large  and  vigorous  direction  of  the 
dramatic  action  as  a  whole.  The  play  might  properly  be 
called  the  tragedy  of  Brutus,  since  it  closes  with  his 
death.  On  the  other  hand,  even  after  the  death  of 
Caesar  in  the  third  act,  his  spirit  continues  to  animate  the 
action,  in  the  speech  in  which  Antony  calls  on  the  very 
stones  of  Rome  to  rise  and  mutiny,  in  the  apparition  of 
the  spectre  which  accosts  Brutus  in  his  tent,  and  in  the 
fulfilment  of  its  threat  at  Philippi.  There  are,  indeed, 
two  tragic  figures  in  the  piece — Caesar,  like  Lear,  conniv- 
ing at  his  own  ruin,  but  returning  in  the  might  of  his  in- 
domitable personality  to  complete  his  work  of  subjugat- 
ing the  world;  Brutus,  like  Hamlet,  the  instrument  of  a 
cause  which  he  follows  relentlessly  through  doubts,  hesi- 
tations, public  mistakes,  and  private  griefs,  until  he  is 
overwhelmed  by  forces  which  his  own  act  has  set  in 
motion. 

While  writing   the   histories,  Shakespeare   had    found 

time  to  write  the  tragi-comedy  The  Merchant  of  Venice, 

and  two  brisk  farces,  The  Taming  of  the  Shrew 

ch™t  o1?""  and  The  Merry  Wives  °f  Windsor.  The  last,' 
Venice."  said  to  have  been  written  at  the  request  of 
Queen  Elizabeth,  who  desired  to  see  Falstaff 
in  love,  is  a  hasty  and  rather  perfunctory  piece  of  work, 
written  mostly  in  prose.  It  is  quite  otherwise  with  the 
first-mentioned  play.  In  The  Merchant  of  Venice  we  see 
for  the  first  time  the  presiding  presence  of  the  moral  sense, 
and  a  fundamental  seriousness,  betraying  itself  even  in 
the  deeper  and  more  religious  harmonies  of  the  verse, 
which  mark  the  poet's  advance  over  the  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream  and  Romeo  and  Juliet.  Shylock  was  prob- 


SHAKESPEARE  133 

ably  suggested  by  Barabbas  in  The  Jew  of  Malta,  but 
serves  to  show  how  far  Shakespeare  had  transcended 
Marlowe's  influence.  In  Portia  Shakespeare  drew  his 
second  great  portrait  of  a  woman.  She  is  an  elder  sister 
of  Juliet,  less  vehement,  with  a  larger  experience  of  life, 
a  stronger  and  more  practised  intellect. 

In  the  three  comedies  which  followed,  written  between 
1598  and  1601,  he  drew  three  other  unforgettable  female 
portraits,  Beatrice  in  Mitch  Ado  About  Noth- 
ing, Rosalind  in  As  You  Like  //,  and  Viola  in 
Twelfth  Night.  And,  grouped  around  them, 
what  a  holiday  company  of  delightful  figures ! — Benedick, 
"  the  married  man,"  trying  in  vain  to  parry  the  thrusts  of 
Beatrice's  nimble  wit;  the  philosophical  Touchstone,  shak- 
ing his  head  over  the  country  wench  Audrey,  because  the 
gods  have  not  made  her  poetical;  the  meditative  Jacques 
(a  first  faint  sketch,  it  has  been  said,  of  Hamlet),  with 
his  melancholy  "compounded  of  many  simples";  Sir 
Toby  Belch,  champion  of  the  ancient  doctrine  of  cakes 
and  ale,  and  ginger  hot  in  the  mouth;  the  unspeakable 
Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek;  the  solemn  prig  and  egotist  Mal- 
volio,  smirking  and  pointing  at  his  cross-garters;  Maria, 
"youngest  wren  of  nine";  and  the  clown  Feste,  with  his 
marvellous  haunting  songs.  All  these  and  dozens  more 
move  here  in  a  kaleidoscope  of  intense  life,  spiritualized 
by  an  indescribable  poetic  radiance. 

To  the  same  period  probably  belong  most  of  the  son- 
nets which  were  published  in  1609,  but  to  which  a  refer- 
ence was  made  in  1598.  In  regard  to  their 
biographical  significance  there  has  been  much 
the  same  sort  of  discussion  as  that  attracted  by  Sidney's 
Astrophel  and  Stella.  There  is,  however,  this  difference, 
that  while  the  latter  tells  a  straightforward  story,  whether 
true  or  not,  Shakespeare's  sonnets  are  addressed  to  sev- 
eral persons,  and  it  is  by  no  means  certain  that  they 
make  two,  or  even  more,  continuous  sequences.  They 


134  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

represent  in  part  a  relation  of  the  poet  to  two  persons, 
"a  man  right  fair,"  and  "a  woman  colored  ill,"  a  relation 
marked  by  passion,  jealousy,  betrayal.  Like  Sidney's 
sonnets,  they  show  much  of  the  artificial  language  of  the 
professional  sonneteer,  mingled  with  touches  of  such 
penetrating  truth  to  human  nature  that  they  seem  in- 
contestably  the  result  of  personal  experience.  Whatever 
their  relation  to  the  facts  of  Shakespeare's  outward  life, 
they  embody  the  emotion  and  reflection  of  his  inner 
world,  expressed  in  lines  of  passionate  pleading  or  pro- 
test, and  again  of  grave,  philosophic  eloquence. 

It  was  for  long  the  fashion  to  suppose  that  some  time 
about  1 60 1  Shakespeare  passed  from  a  happy,  care-free, 
idyllic  existence,  typified  by  As  You  Like  It 
and  Twelfth  Night,  into  a  period  of  sorrow 
and  gloom,  expressed  in  the  bitter,  cynical 
comedies,  Measure  for  Measure  and  Troilus  afid  Cressida, 
and  the  great  tragedies,  Hamlet,  Macbeth,  King  Lear.  I ; 
was  even  plausibly  suggested  that  the  mysterious  influ- 
ence of  the  Dark  Lady  of  the  sonnets  was  the  cause 
of  this  change.  It  is  clear  at  present  that  no  such  per- 
sonal explanation  is  necessary  for  the  change  in  thr 
spirit  of  Shakespeare's  work.  A  growing  taste  for  satin; 
and  tragedy  on  the  part  of  the  playgoing  public  in  th<; 
early  years  of  the  seventeenth  century  brought  about 
similar  alterations  in  the  work  of  the  other  dramatists. 
The  difference  between  the  tone  of  the  two  periods,  how- 
ever, is  so  marked  as  to  make  the  division  a  useful  one. 

The  note  of  the  new  period  is  struck  by  the  comedies. 

In  Troilus  and  Cressida  Shakespeare  drew  a  picture  of 

faithlessness  in  love,  a  picture  so  cynical,  so 

™dBitt"k      fierce  in  its  bitterness,  that  it  is  almost  im- 

Comedies."      possible  to  think  of  it  as  the  work  of  the  hand 

which  drew  Juliet,  Portia,  and  Rosalind.     In 

All's  Well  That  Ends  Well  he  told  in  dramatic  form  a 

story  from  Boccaccio's  Decameron,  a  typical  bit  of  Italian 


SHAKESPEARE  135 

Renaissance  fiction  showing  how  a  woman  .by  adroitness 
and  enterprise — in  short,  by  that  supreme  human  force 
which  the  Italians  called  virtu — makes  herself  mistress  of 
the  person  and  then  of  the  love  of  her  husband.  It  is  to 
be  credited  to  Shakespeare's  skill  that  the  strong-minded 
heroine,  Helena,  has  throughout  the  sympathy  of  the 
audience.  In  Measure  far  Measure  Shakespeare  struck 
at  the  hypocrisy  of  a  man  high-placed  in  office  and  pos- 
ing as  a  severe  moralist,  who  nevertheless  yields  to  the 
very  sin  he  punishes  most  ruthlessly  in  others. 

In  Hamlet,  the  first  of  the  four  great  tragedies  which 
form  the  "captain  jewels  in  the  carcanet"  of  the  master's 
work,  we  have  the  spectacle  of  a  sensitive  and 
highly  intellectual  youth,  endowed  with  all 
the  gifts  which  make  for  greatness  of  living,  suddenly 
confronted  with  the  knowledge  that  his  father  has  been 
murdered,  and  that  his  mother  has  married  the  murderer. 
Even  before  the  revelation  comes,  Hamlet  feels  himself 
to  be  living  in  an  alien  moral  world,  and  is  haunted  by 
dark  misgivings.  When  his  father's  ghost  appears  to 
him,  with  its  imperative  injunction  to  revenge,  Hamlet 
f.akes  his  resolution  instantly.  His  feigned  madness,  an 
element  of  the  drama  retained  by  Shakespeare  from  the 
old  story  whence  he  drew  the  plot,  is  the  first  device 
which  Hamlet  hits  upon  to  aid  him  in  his  dangerous  duty. 
In  spite  of  the  endless  debate  concerning  the  reality  of 
Hamlet's  madness,  there  is  no  room  for  question  in  the 
matter.  Not  only  is  he  perfectly  sane,  but  his  handling 
of  the  difficult  situation  in  which  he  finds  himself  is  in 
all  points  swift  and  masterful.  He  gives  up  his  love  for 
Ophelia  because  he  cannot  take  her  with  him  into  the 
dark  pass  which  he  is  compelled  to  enter;  and  the  scathing 
satire  which  he  pours  out  upon  her  when  he  fancies  her 
in  league  with  Polonius  and  the  King  to  play  the  spy  upon 
him,  gathers  its  force  from  the  greatness  of  the  renun- 
ciation he  has  made.  His  scheme  for  proving  the  King's 


136  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

guilt  beyond  a  peradventure,  by  means  of  the  strolling 
players,  is  consummated  with  ingenious  skill.  His  deal- 
ings with  Rosencrantz  and  Guildenstern  are  those  of  a 
gifted  man  of  action,  to  whose  resolute  will  thought  is  a 
swift  minister.  His  purpose  is  always  firm;  and  it  is  one 
of  the  ironies  of  circumstance  that  Hamlet  has  come  to 
stand  in  most  minds  for  a  type  of  irresolution.  This  mis- 
understanding of  the  character  is  largely  due  to  the 
exaltation  of  excitement  in  Hamlet,  which  causes  his 
mind,  even  in  the  moment  when  he  is  pursuing  his  pur- 
pose with  most  intentness,  to  play  with  feverish  brilliancy 
over  the  questions  of  man's  life  and  death;  which  makes 
his  throbbing,  white-hot  imagination  a  meeting-place  for 
grotesque  and  extravagant  fancies;  and  which  leads  him, 
so  to  speak,  to  cover  the  solid  framework  of  his  enterprise 
with  a  wild  festoonery  of  intellectual  whim,  to  envelop  it 
in  fitful  eloquence,  swift  and  subtle  wit,  contemptuous 
irony,  and  mordant  satire.  Yet  this  is  merely  the  by- 
play of  his  mind,  the  volatilized  substance  which  escapes 
under  the  heat  of  excitement.  In  the  midst  of  it  he 
remains  perfectly  master  of  himself  and  of  his  means,  a 
supremely  rational,  competent,  and  determined  being,  a 
prince  and  master  of  men,  dedicated  irrevocably  to  ruin 
in  the  moral  chaos  where  the  "cursed  spite"  of  his  destiny 
has  thrown  him.  With  a  miraculous  art  Shakespeare  has 
depicted  this  character,  not  fixed  in  outline,  but  changing 
and  palpitant  as  life  itself;  so  that  it  constantly  eludes 
our  definition,  and  seems  forever  passing  from  one  state 
of  being  into  another,  in  the  passion  of  its  struggle. 

Othello  has  a  certain  affinity  to  Hamlet  in  that  here 
also  the  hero's  soul  is  thrown  into  violent  perturbation 
"Othello."  ky  the  discovery  of  evil  poisoning  the  very 
sources  of  his  life.  In  Othello's  case  the 
pathos  and  the  tragedy  are  heightened  by  the  fact  that 
the  evil  exists  only  in  the  hero's  imagination,  into  which 
we  see  the  demon-like  lago  pouring,  drop  by  drop,  the 


SHAKESPEARE  137 

poison  of  suspicion.  Othello  is  not  by  nature  jealous; 
he  everywhere  shows  himself  "of  an  open  and  free  na- 
ture," incapable  of  petty  suspicion.  But  when  lago, 
working  cautiously,  with  diabolic  skill,  has  at  last  con- 
vinced him  that  Desdemona  is  false,  the  fatal  rage  which 
seizes  him  is  a  hysterical  reaction  from  the  sickening  blow 
of  disillusion.  The  real  centre  of  gravity  in  the  play  is 
lago,  with  his  "honest"  manners,  his  blunt  speech,  his 
downright  materialistic  philosophy,  his  plausible  zeal  in 
his  master's  service;  underneath  all  of  which  his  real 
nature  lies  coiled  like  a  snake,  waiting  for  a  chance  to 
sting. 

King  Lear  is  often  put  at  the  apex  of  Shakespeare's 
achievement,  and  by  many  judges  at  the  head  of  the  dra- 
matic literature  of  the  world.     The  story  was 
as  old  as  Geoffrey  of  Monmouth  (see  page  iS? 

29),  and,  like  so  many  of  the  themes  which 
Shakespeare  handled,  had  already  been  made  the  subject 
of  a  play,  a  crude  effort  by  some  nameless  playwright 
during  the  experimental ,  stage  of  Elizabethan  drama. 
Here,  as  was  his  constant  custom,  Shakespeare  followed 
the  main  lines  of  the  story  given  him,  and  incorporated 
into  his  grand  edifice  every  bit  of  usable  material  from 
the  building  of  his  predecessor.  Here,  too,  as  always  in 
Shakespeare,  if  we  pierce  to  the  core  of  his  meaning,  the 
real  tragedy  is  a  spiritual  one.  Lear  is  an  imperious 
nature,  wayward  by  temperament,  and  made  more  in- 
capable of  self-government  by  long  indulgence  of  his 
passionate  whims.  At  the  opening  of  the  play  we  see 
him  striving  to  find  a  refuge  from  himself  by  surrendering 
all  his  wealth  and  power  in  exchange  for  absolute  love. 
The  heart  of  the  old  King  demands  love;  love  is  the  ele- 
ment upon  which  it  subsists,  and  age,  instead  of  abating 
this  hunger,  has  made  the  craving  more  imperious.  He 
demands  love  not  only  in  the  spirit  but  in  the  letter,  and 
thrusts  his  youngest  daughter,  Cordelia,  from  him  with 


138  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

cruel  brusqueness,  when  she  refuses  to  use  the  terms  of 
extravagant  hyperbole  to  describe  her  affection.  Shake- 
speare has  made  this  same  brusque  and  hasty  spirit  of 
the  King  precipitate  upon  his  old  head  the  enmity  of  his 
remaining  daughters,  Goneril  and  Regan.  Before  he  has 
recovered  from  the  shock  of  Cordelia's  defection,  this 
awful  pair  of  daughters  lay  bare,  little  by  little,  their 
monstrous  souls  to  their  father's  gaze.  As  in  Othello,  the 
result  of  the  revelation  is  to  unhinge  for  the  sufferer  the 
very  order  of  nature.  As  if  in  sympathy  with  the  chaos 
in  Lear's  soul,  the  elements  break  loose;  and  in  the  pauses 
of  the  blast  we  hear  the  noise  of  violent  crimes,  curses, 
heart-broken  jesting,  the  chatter  of  idiocy,  and  the  wan- 
dering tongue  of  madness.  The  sentimentalist's  phrase, 
" poetic  justice,"  has  no  meaning  for  Shakespeare.  The 
ruin  wrought  in  the  old  King's  heart  and  brain  is  irrepara- 
ble, and  the  tornado  which  whirls  him  to  his  doom  car- 
ries with  it  the  just  and  the  unjust.  The  little  golden 
pause  of  peace,  when  Lear  and  Cordelia  are  united,  is  fol- 
lowed by  the  intolerably  piercing  scene  in  which  he  bears 
her  dead  body  out  of  the  prison,  muttering  that  they 
have  hanged  his  "poor  fool."  The  consequences. of  rash 
action,  heartlessly  taken  advantage  of.  were  never  fol- 
lowed out  to  a  grimmer  end. 

In  Macbeth  Shakespeare  depicted  the  passion  of  ambi- 
tion working  in  a  nature  morally  weak,  but  endowed  with 
"Macbeth"  an  intense  P°etic  susceptibility.  Macbeth  is 
a  dreamer  and  a  sentimentalist,  capable  of 
conceiving  vividly  the  goal  of  his  evil  desires,  but  in- 
capable either  of  resolute  action  in  attaining  them  or  of 
a  ruthless  enjoyment  of  them  when  attained.  By  the 
murder  of  the  King,  Macbeth  is  plunged  into  a  series  of 
crimes,  in  which  he  persists  with  a  kind  of  faltering  des- 
peration, until  he  falls  before  the  accumulated  vengeance, 
material  and  ghostly,  raised  up  to  punish  him.  As  in 
Antony  and  Cleopatra  we  are  show.u  the  slow  degenera- 


SHAKESPEARE 


139 


tion  of  the  hero's  character  under  the  slavery  of  sense,  so 
here  we  behold  the  break-up  of  a  soul  under  the  torture 
of  its  own  sick  imagination.  The  ghost  of  Banquo,  shak- 
ing its  gory  locks  at  Macbeth  from  its  seat  at  the  banquet 
table,  is  a  symbol  of  the  spiritual  distemper  which  results 
from  the  working  of  a  tyrannous  imagination  upon  a 
nature  morally  unprovided.  The  witch-hags  who  meet 
Macbeth  on  the  heath  are  concrete  embodiments  of  the 
powers  of  evil,  summoned  from  the  four  corners  of  the 
air  by  affinity  with  the  evil  heart  of  the  schemer.  Shake- 
speare did  not,  of  course,  consciously  strive  after  symbol- 
ism in  these  things.  It  does  not  seem  impossible,  indeed, 
that  he  believed  in  ghosts  and  witches,  as  did  the  great 
mass  of  men  in  his  day,  from  King  James  down.  It  is 
certain  that  he  was  interested  in  his  story,  here  and  else- 
where, as  a  piece  of  life  rather  than  as  a  moral  symbol; 
his  work  is  full  of  types  and  symbols  simply  because  life 
itself  is  full  of  them. 

Beside  Macbeth  Shakespeare  has  placed  a  woman  who 
possesses  all  the  masculine  qualities  which  the  hero  lacks, 
but  who  is  nevertheless  intensely  feminine  in  her  devo- 
tion to  her  lord's  interest,  and  in  her  inability  to  endure 
the  strain  of  a  criminal  life  after  his  support  has  been 
withdrawn  from  her.  Her  will,  though  majestic  when  in 
the  prosperous  service  of  her  husband's  ambition,  col- 
lapses in  sudden  ruin  when  he  fails  to  rise  to  the  responsi- 
bilities of  their  grim  situation.  Macbeth's  feebler  moral 
substance  crumbles  piecemeal;  but  the  firm  structure  of 
his  wife's  spirit,  as  soon  as  its  natural  foundation  is  de- 
stroyed, falls  by  instant  overthrow. 

Toward    the    conclusion    of    this    period    Shakespeare 
turned  again  to  Roman  history  for  subject-matter,  treat- 
ing it  with  the  tragic  force  and  the  satiric 
contempt    that    characterize    the    plays    al-    p^ 
ready  discussed.     In  Antony  and  Cleopatra  he 
showed  the  character  of  a  great  Roman  general,  crumbling 


140  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

before  the  breath  of  Eastern  luxury  and  sensuality,  per- 
sonified in  Cleopatra,  the  "worm  of  old  Nile."  In  Corio- 
lanus  he  poured  out  his  scorn  for  the  "mob,"  the  fickle, 
many-headed  multitude,  played  upon  by  demagogues, 
and  working  its  own  destruction  in  its  hatred  of  those 
who  refuse  to  flatter  and  amuse  it. 

In  two  of  the  later  plays  of  this  period  Shakespeare  re- 
verted to  his  early  practice  of  working  in  collaboration. 
One  of  these,  Timon  of  Athens,  is  thoroughly 
^  the  mood  of  tnis  period,  a  kind  of  summing 
up  of  the  pessimistic  view  of  life  in  the  person 
of  Timon,  the  misanthrope,  the  character  which  consti- 
tutes Shakespeare's  contribution  to  the  play.  The  other 
play  written  in  collaboration,  Pericles,  Prince  of  Tyre, 
anticipates  in  a  measure  the  romantic  character  of  Shake- 
speare's last  work.  The  success  of  this  piece,  indeed, 
announced  the  rather  general  revival  of  romance  on  the 
London  stage  which  succeeded  the  vogue  of  tragedy  and 
satire. 

The  plays  which  mark  the  closing  period  of  Shake- 
speare's life  are  pure  romances,  conceived  in  a  spirit  of 
deep  and  lovely  serenity,  and  characterized 
jXth*  the     by  a  silvery  delicacy,  a  tender  musing  touch, 
Period.  which  is  new  in  the  poet's  work.     The  first 

of  the  plays  of  the  last  period  is  Cymbeline, 
with  its  exquisite  picture  of  Imogen  and  the  woodland 
scenes  between  Arviragus  and  the  young  princes.  Then 
followed  A  Winter's  Tale,  based  upon  Robert  Greene's 
Pandosto— which,  like  Lodge's  Rosalynde,  had  in  part  an 
Arcadian  background.  The  wooing  of  Prince  Florizel 
and  Perdita  has  come,  like  the  scenes  in  the  Forest  of 
Arden,  to  represent  the  very  soul  of  pastoral  romance. 
But  the  supreme  exercise  of  the  magic  power  of  the 
master  is  seen  in  The  Tempest.  The  background  of  the 
play  was  suggested  by  the  wrecking  of  a  vessel  bound 
for  Virginia,  on  the  Bermudas,  as  narrated  in  A  Dis- 
covery of  the  Bermudas,  othermse  called  the  Isle  of 


SHAKESPEARE 


141 


Divels  (1610),  and  numerous  other  pamphlets.  Thus 
Shakespeare  had  the  greatest  stimulus  to  the  imagination 
of  the  age,  the  appeal  of  the  new  world  beyond  the  sea, 
to  work  with.  And  to  meet  the  possibilities  of  his  theme 
he  summoned  all  his  powers:  the  grace  that  had  created 
the  fairy  world  of  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  the  lyric 
passion  that  had  breathed  through  Juliet's  lips  on  her 
bridal  morning,  the  drollery  and  wit  that  had  set  the 
laughter  of  centuries  billowing  about  Falstaff,  the  titanic 
might  that  had  sent  a  world  crashing  on  the  head  of 
Lear — all  meet  together  here,  but  curbed,  softened,  sil- 
vered down  into  exquisite  harmony. 

The  Tempest  was  one  of  the  plays  acted  at  the  wedding 
of  Princess  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  James  I,  to  Frederick, 
Elector  Palatine,  in  1613,  and  was  long  thought  to  have 
been  written  for  that  occasion.  While  it  was  probably 
written  a  little  earlier,  and  was  followed  by  Henry  VIII 
— a  chronicle  play  in  which  Shakespeare  collaborated 
with  Fletcher — it  may  in  a  true  sense  be  called  Shake- 
speare's farewell  to  his  art.  When  scarcely  fifty  years  of 
age,  with  his  genius  at  its  ripest,  and  every  faculty  of  his 
mind  in  full  play,  he  laid  down  his  pen  forever — as  Pros- 
pero,  at  the  end,  abjures  his  magic,  breaks  his  wand,  and 
drowns  his  book  "deeper  than  did  ever  plummet  sound." 
One  is  tempted  to  indulge  the  fanciful  parallel  still  fur- 
ther, and  to  think  of  Ariel,  the  delicate  and  potent  sprite 
whom  Prospero  sets  free,  as  the  spirit  of  Imagination, 
now  released  from  its  long  labors  in  the  master's  service. 

The  common  opinion  that  Shakespeare  was  unappre- 
ciated by  his  own  generation  is  only  partly  true.     If  other 
evidence  were  lacking  to  prove  the  esteem  in          reciation 
which  he  was  held,   his  material  prosperity     Of  Shake- 
would  be  sufficient  to  show  at  least  his  high     gj^j1 
popularity    with    the    theatre-going    public. 
But  there  is  witness  that  his  genius  was  in  tolerable  mea- 
sure   recognized.     His    great    antitype    and    rival,    Ben 
Jonson,  whose  burly  good  sense  was  not  prone  to  exag- 


142  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

geration,  and  who  perhaps  never  quite  conquered  a  feel- 
ing of  jealousy  toward  Shakespeare,  wrote  for  the  first 
collective  edition  of  the  plays,  published  in  1623,  a  eulogy 
full  of  deep,  in  places  even  passionate,  admiration;  and 
afterward  said  of  him  in  a  passage  of  moving  sincerity: 
"I  did  love  and  honor  him,  on  this  side  idolatry,  as  much 
as  any."  The  most  significant  hint  we  have  of  his  per- 
sonal charm  is  in  the  adjective  which  is  constantly  applied 
to  him  by  his  friends,  " gentle,"  a  word  also  often  used 
to  describe  his  art,  in  allusion  evidently  to  its  humanity 
and  poetic  grace. 

The  awe  inspired  by  the  almost  unearthly  power  and 
richness  of  Shakespeare's  mind  is  apt  to  be  deepened  by 

the  knowledge  that  the  noble  plays  to  which 
ffis  English-speaking  races  point  as  their  great- 

of^ame!168'     est  single  achievement,  were  thrown  into  the 

world  carelessly,  and  would  have  perished 
altogether  if  the  author  of  them  had  had  his  way.  Dur- 
ing his  lifetime  they  were  printed  only  in  cheap  quartos, 
often  pirated,  the  copy  taken  down  by  shorthand  from 
the  lips  of  the  players,  or  patched  up  from  prompters' 
manuscripts  dishonestly  acquired.  He  does  not  mention 
his  plays  in  his  will.  Not  until  seven  years  after  his 
death  did  a  collective  edition  appear  (known  as  the  First 
Folio),  and  then  only  because  of  the  piety  of  two  of  his 
actor-friends.  There  are  reasons  for  this  apparent  neg- 
lect. The  printing  of  a  play  while  it  was  still  actable 
was  disadvantageous  to  the  company  whose  property  it 
was;  and  Shakespeare  had  probably  made  over  his  plays 
to  his  company  as  they  were  produced.  Notwithstand- 
ing, when  all  this  is  taken  into  consideration,  we  are  yet 
filled  with  astonishment.  We  see  in  the  working  of  the 
master's  spirit  not  only  the  vast  liberality  but  the  start- 
ling carelessness  of  nature,  who  seems  with  infinite  loving 
pains  to  create  her  marvels,  and  then  to  turn  listlessly 
away  while  they  are  given  over  to  destruction. 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE     SEVENTEENTH     CENTURY:     SHAKESPEARE'S     CONTEM- 
PORARIES   AND    SUCCESSORS    IN    THE    DRAMA 

IN  the  preceding  chapter  we  regarded  Shakespeare  as 
standing  alone,  in  order  that  by  isolating  his  work  we 
might  better  see  its  absolute  qualities.  We  must  now 
turn  to  those  playwrights  who  worked  at  the  same  time 
and  in  many  cases  side  by  side  with  him,  and  try  to  get 
some  notion  of  the  wonderful  variety  of  the  drama  during 
its  period  of  full  bloom.  And  we  must  trace  briefly  the 
steps  by  which  the  drama  declined,  both  by  inner  decay 
and  outward  opposition,  until,  in  1642,  at  the  beginning 
of  the  great  Civil  War,  the  doors  of  the  theatres  were 
closed,  not  to  open  again  until  the  Restoration,  eighteen 
years  later. 

The  most  commanding  figure  in  the  group  of  Shake- 
speare's dramatic  contemporaries  is  Ben  Jonson  (1573- 
1637).  Although  brought  up  in  humble  sur-  Ben  Jonson> 
roundings — his  stepfather  was  a  bricklayer — 
he  was  sent  to  Westminster  School  and  possibly  to  Cam- 
bridge; and  he  ultimately  became  one  of  the  most  learned 
men  of  his  time.  As  a  young  man  he  went  upon  one 
campaign  with  the  English  army  in  Flanders,  where  (as  he 
afterward  boasted)  he  fought  a  duel  with  a  champion  of 
the  enemy  in  the  sight  of  both  armies,  and  took  from  him 
his  arms,  in  the  classic  manner.  The  incident  is  highly 
characteristic  of  Jonson 's  rugged  and  domineering  char- 
acter. As  he  served  the  Flemish  soldier,  he  afterward 
served  the  luckless  poets  and  poetasters  who  challenged 
him  to  a  war  of  words. 

143 


144  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

After  returning  to  England,  he  began  to  work  for  the 
theatres.  His  first  important  play  was  Every  Man  in 
His  Humour  (1598),  in  which  Shakespeare  is  known  to 
have  acted.  He  engaged  in  a  series  of  literary  quarrels, 
in  the  course  of  which  he  wrote  several  elaborate  plays, 
Cynthia's  Revels,  The  Poetaster,  etc.,  to  revenge  himself 
upon  his  rather  puny  enemies.  His  four  masterpieces  ap- 
peared between  1605  and  1614.  They  are  The  Silent 
Woman,  Volpone,  The  Alchemist,  and  Bartholomew  Fair — 
all  called  comedies  by  him,  though  the  second  is  a  gloomy 
and  biting  satire,  and  the  last  a  pure  farce.  He  also 
wrote  two  massive  tragedies  taken  from  Roman  history, 
Sejanus  and  Catiline.  For  many  years  after  his  appoint- 
ment by  James  I  as  poet-laureate,  he  supplied  the  King 
with  court-masques,  little  spectacle  plays  delicate  in  fancy 
and  rich  in  lyric  tracery,  which  were  acted  at  Whitehall 
by  gorgeously  costumed  lords  and  ladies,  amid  magnificent 
stage-settings  contrived  by  the  King's  architect,  Inigo 
Jones,  with  the  lyrics  set  to  music  by  the  King's  musician, 
Ferrabosco. 

Jonson  came  to  the  front  as  a  dramatist  at  a  time  when 
one  set  of  tendencies  in  the  Renaissance,  i.  e.,  those  in 
the  direction  of  imitation  of  the  classics,  were 
asserting  themselves  strongly  against  the 
practice  of  unlimited  individualism  and  free- 
dom in  art  which  we  call  romantic.  Sidney  had  already 
shown  his  scorn  of  plays  on  the  native  English  model, 
and  he  was  followed  by  a  group  of  poets  and  critics  who 
attacked  all  forms  of  romantic  literature  in  satires  and 
epistles,  written  in  imitation  of  the  Latin  poets.  By  the 
beginning  of  the  century  this  reaction  had  gone  so  far 
that,  as  we  have  seen,  Shakespeare  was  "probably  influ- 
enced by  it  to  desert  chronicle  history  and  romantic 
comedy  for  tragedy  and  satire.  Jonson  shows  this  move- 
ment in  the  drama.  He  took  up  the  line  of  development 
which  had  been  begun  in  Gorboduc,  Ralph  Roister  Doister, 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  145 

and  other  plays  written  under  the  influence  of  Seneca 
and  Plautus.  The  classical  reaction  was  short-lived,  and 
the  romantic  temper  reasserted  itself,  as  we  see  in  the 
later  plays  of  Shakespeare,  but  Jonson  refused  to  bend. 
He  fought  all  his  life  long  a  battle  against  what  he  judged 
to  be  the  ignorant  preference  of  the  public  for  the  roman- 
tic form.  Not  only  did  he  stand  out  for  the  classical 
"unities"  (see  page  112),  but  he  made  war  upon  the  fan- 
tastic and  extravagant  qualities  of  romantic  imagination, 
and  labored  to  supplant  them  by  classical  sanity  and 
restraint. 

In  one  respect  at  least  the  classical  quality  of  Jonson's 
comedies  gave  them  an  interest  that  is  permanent,  and 
an  influence  that  was  far-reaching.  One  dif- 
ference between  the  romantic  spirit  and  the 
classic  is  that  the  former  tends  toward  escape 
from  the  actual  conditions  of  life,  while  the  latter  tends 
to  work  realistically  within  them.  This  appears  when 
we  compare  Twelfth  Night  or  Tlie  Tempest  with  Every 
Man  in  His  Humour.  The  former  are  full  of  glancing 
imagination  and  irresponsible  fancy;  the  latter  moves  in 
the  hard  light  of  every-day  London.  This  realism,  the 
vivid  picture  of  London  life,  makes  Jonson's  comedies 
among  the  most  interesting  plays  of  the  period.  From 
Jonson's  comedies  alone  it  would  be  possible  to  recon- 
struct whole  areas  of  Elizabethan  society;  a  study  of  them 
is  indispensable  if  one  would  know  the  brilliant  and 
amusing  surface  of  the  most  sociable  era  of  English  his- 
tory. At  least  one  of  Jonson's  comedies,  too,  gives  this 
close  and  realistic  study  of  manners  with  a  gayety  and 
grace  fairly  rivalling  Shakespeare;  The  Silent  Woman  is 
one  of  the  most  sparkling  comedies  ever  written,  full  of 
splendid  fun,  and  with  a  bright,  quick  movement  which 
never  flags. 

Another  peculiarity  of  Jonson's  art  is  hinted  at  by  the 
title  Every  Man  in  His  Humour.     The  word  "humor" 


146  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

was  a  cant  term  in  his  day,1  equivalent  to  "whim"  or 
" foible."    He  hit  upon  the  device  of  endowing  each  one 

of  his  characters  with  some  particular  whim 
Humors.  or  affectation,  some  ludicrous  exaggeration  of 

manner,  speech,  or  dress;  and  of  so  thrust- 
ing forward  this  single  odd  trait  that  all  others  might  be 
lost  sight  of.  Every  man,  in  other  words,  should  be  "in 
his  humor."  This  working  principle  Jonson  extended 
afterward  in  his  two  great  comedies,  Volpone  and  The 
Alchemist.  In  Volpone  he  studied,  not  a  foible  or  whim, 
but  a  master-passion,  the  passion  of  greed,  as  it  affects 
a  whole  social  group;  in  The,  Alchemist  he  made  an  elab- 
orate study  of  human  gullibility.  There  is  doubtless 
something  mechanical  in  this  method  of  going  to  work 
according  to  a  set  programme.  Shakespeare  also  has 
devoted  whole  plays  to  the  study  of  a  master-passion — 
in  Othello  that  of  jealousy,  in  Macbeth  that  of  ambition. 
But  he  does  this  in  a  very  different  way  from  Jonson; 
with  much  more  variety,  surprise,  and  free  play  of  life. 
Jonson  has,  as  it  were,  a  thesis  to  illustrate,  and  holds  up 
one  character  after  another,  as  a  logician  presents  the 
various  parts  of  his  argument.  In  other  words,  he  al- 
ways, or  nearly  always,  lets  us  see  the  machinery.  But 
while  he  thus  loses  in  spontaneity,  he  gains  in  intellectual 
unity  and  in  massiveness  of  purpose. 
-  Jonson's  lyric  gift,  for  its  delicacy  and  sweetness,  was 
conspicuous  even  in  the  Elizabethan  age,  when  almost 

HisL  -c         6Very  writer  was  caPa°le  of  turning  off  a 
Gift.  ^  charming  song.     The  best  known  of  his  lyrics 

are  "Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes,"  and 
"See  the  chariot  at  hand  here  of  love";  of  both  these  the 
old-time  music  has  fortunately  reached  us.  Like  Shake- 
speare, he  used  his  lyric  power  to  insert  into  the  sober 
setting  of  his  plays  exquisite  gems  of  song.  The  "  Queen 
and  huntress,  chaste  and  fair,"  from  Cynthia's  Revels,  is 

1  Note  Bardolph's  use  of  the  word  in  Henry  IV  and  Henry  V. 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  147 

a  perfect  example  of  classic  beauty  in  lyric  form,  in  con- 
trast with  the  romantic  glamour  of  Shakespeare's  "Take, 
oh,  take  those  lips  away,"  from  Measure  for  Measure,  or 
"Full  fathom  five  thy  father  lies,"  from  The  Tempest. 

Jonson  was  also  a  critic  of  great  sanity  and  force.  His 
volume  of  short  reflections  upon  life  and  art,  entitled 
Timber,  shows  in  an  attractive  guise  the  solidity,  aggres- 
siveness, and  downright  honesty  of  his  mind.  It  was 
chiefly  these  qualities  of  aggressive  decision 
and  rugged  honesty  which  enabled  him  to  Jonson  as  a 
hold  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  his  position 


of  literary  dictator,  and  lord  of  the  "tavern- 
wits."  The  tavern  was  for  the  seventeenth  century  what 
the  coffee-house  was  for  the  eighteenth,  a  rallying-place 
for  literary  men;  and  Jonson  is  almost  as  typical  a  tavern 
figure  as  Falstaff.  His  "mountain  belly  and  his  rocky 
face,"  his  genial,  domineering  personality,  ruled  by  royal 
right  the  bohemian  circle  which  gathered  at  "The  Mer- 
maid" or  "The  Devil,"  where  the  young  fellows  of  the 
"tribe  of  Ben"  heard  words 

So  nimble  and  so  full  of  subtle  flame 
As  if  that  every  one  from  whence  they  came 
Had  meant  to  put  his  whole  wit  in  a  jest, 
And  had  resolved  to  live  a  fool  the  rest 
Of  his  dull  life.1 

Here  took  place  those  famous  wit-combats  between  Jon- 
son and  Shakespeare  described  by  Fuller  under  the  simile 
of  a  sea-fight;  Jonson,  slow  of  movement  and  "high 
built  in  learning,"  being  likened  to  a  great  Spanish  gal- 
leon, Shakespeare  to  an  English  man-of-war,  swift  to 
strike  and  dart  away,  confounding  the  enemy  with  agility 
and  adroitness. 

The  qualities  for  which  Ben  Jonson  demands  admira- 
tion are  rather  of  the  solid  than  the  brilliant  kind.     In  an 
age  of  imaginative  license  he  preached  the  need  of  re- 
1  Verses  entitled  "  Master  Francis  Beaumont  to  Ben  Jonson." 


148  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

straint;  in  an  age  of  hasty,  careless  workmanship  he 
preached  the  need  of  sound  construction  and  good  finish. 
He  was  a  safe  guide;  if  the  younger  dramatists  of  his  day 
had  heeded  him,  the  drama  would  not  have  gone  on,  as 
it  did,  deepening  in  extravagance  and  license  until  it 
died,  so  to  speak,  of  dissipation. 

In  the  dramatists  next  to  be  discussed  we  shall  see  the 
opposition  between  romantic  and  classical  elements  such 
as  are  represented  in  the  works  of  Shake- 
sPeare  and  Ben  Jonson.  On  the  whole,  the 
romantic  forces  were  in  the  ascendant,  but 
one  classical  legacy — the  satiric  presentation  of  real  life 
in  what  is  called  the  Comedy  of  Manners — is  due  to  Jon- 
son's  influence.  This  tendency  grew  stronger  as  the 
century  advanced,  and  many  of  the  Jacobean  dramatists 
yielded  to  it  in  their  later  days.  It  must  be  remembered 
that  both  the  romantic  and  the  realistic  elements  were 
used  in  a  way  that  justifies  us  in  applying  the  term  deca- 
dence to  the  drama  of  the  period.  There  was  a  straining 
for  effect,  a  deliberate  search  for  sensation,  in  the  romance, 
and  an  unbelievable  coarseness  in  the  realism.  And  in 
both  there  was  an  absence  of  moral  standards,  a  disre- 
gard of  moral  values,  that  marked  a  great  falling  off  from 
the  plane  of  Shakespeare  and  Jonson.  It  had  been  the 
glory  of  the  early  English  Renaissance,  in  distinction 
from  the  Italian,  that  it  had  subordinated  individual 
enterprise  and  initiative  to  the  service  of  the  common 
weal.  In  these  later  days  the  drama  became  a  positive 
enemy  of  the  social  order.  It  was  in  part  for  this  reason 
that  the  Puritans  attacked  it,  and  wholly  for  this  reason 
that  it  had  no  strength  to  resist  the  attack. 
^  Next  to  Shakespeare  and  Ben  Jonson  the  most  impres- 
sive body  of  plays  is  that  which  goes  under  the  names  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  though  in  fact  these  two  collab- 
orated in  only  ten,  the  rest  being  the  work  of  Fletcher 
alone  or  in  partnership  with  others. 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  149 

Francis  Beaumont  (1584-1616)  and  John  Fletcher 
(1579-1625)  are,  in  Lowell's  phrase,  among  "the  double 
stars  of  the  heavens  of  poetry."  Fletcher, 
the  elder  of  the  two,  was  the  son  of  a  Bishop 
of  London,  through  whom  the  young  drama- 
tist gained  an  unusual  insight  into  court  life.  None  of 
Fletcher's  fellows  knew  so  well  as  he  how  to  paint  the 
hollow  inside  and  the  exquisite  outer  finish  of  courtly 
manners.  Another  fact  contributing  to  form  his  genius 
was  that  the  official  residence  of  his  father,  the  episcopal 
palace  at  Fulham,  lay  amid  beautiful  river  and  forest 
scenery.  To  the  country  memories  gathered  here  in  boy- 
hood he  gave  expression  later  in  the  pastoral  play  of  The 
Faithful  ShepJierdess,  as  well  as  in  the  songs  with  which 
his  dramas  are  richly  interspersed. 

At  the  Mermaid  tavern,  among  those  "sealed  of  the 
tribe  of  Ben."  he  met  the  man  whose  name  is  insepara- 
bly linked  with  his  own.  Francis  Beaumont 
was  five  years  younger  than  Fletcher,  being  ^e^J 
about  twenty-one  at  the  time  of  their  meet-  Partnership, 
ing.  After  their  partnership  began,  tradition 
says  that  they  lived  together  on  the  Bankside,  sharing 
everything,  even  their  clothing,  in  common.  This  at 
least  represents  a  more  essential  truth,  that  they  entered 
into  a  singularly  effective  intellectual  partnership;  one 
mind  supplying  what  the  other  lacked,  to  produce  a 
result  of  full  and  balanced  beauty.  Beaumont  had  the 
deeper  and  more  serious  imagination,  and  the  greater 
constructive  power;  Fletcher  excelled  chiefly  in  lyric 
sweetness,  rhetorical  fluency,  and  many-colored  senti- 
ment. Beaumont  died  in  the  same  year  as  Shakespeare 
(1616) ;  his  colaborer  lived  until  the  accession  of  Charles  I, 
in  1625. 

Among  the  plays  jointly  written,  the  best  are  perhaps 
Philaster  and  The  Maid's  Tragedy,  both  produced  about 
1611.  The  theme  of  Philaster  is  a  common  one  in  the 


150  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

old  drama,  the  same,  for  instance,  as  that  of  Cymbeline, 
namely,  the  unfounded  jealousy  of  a  lover,  and  the  un- 
swerving faithfulness  of  his  lady,  who  follows 

>S  him  in  the  disSuise  of  a  Pa8e-  The  treatment 
shows  the  tendency  of  later  romanticists  to 
push  a  situation  to  extremes,  beyond  all  credibility  and 
reason;  but  the  play  contains  perhaps  more  passages  of 
pure  poetry  than  any  other  in  the  authors'  long  list.  The 
Maid's  Tragedy  is  dramatically  more  powerful.  The  soul 
of  the  hero  is  torn  between  his  sense  of  personal  honor 
and  his  sense  of  the  inviolable  divinity  of  the  King  who 
has  shamefully  wronged  him.  Here  again  there  is  that 
straining  after  intensity  which  marks  the  dramatic  de- 
cadence. In  a  sense,  to  be  sure,  the  search  after  inten- 
sity is  often  present  even  in  the  Elizabethan  drama  at  its 
freshest  and  strongest.  We  have  only  to  think  of  the 
typical  characters  and  situations  of  Marlowe  and  Shake- 
speare to  realize  this  fact.  But  the  intensity  of  the  later 
drama  is  more  feverish  and  artificial.  As  the  obviously 
"strong"  situations  began  to  be  worked  out,  dramatists 
made  excursions  into  the  strained  and  the  exceptional, 
in  order  to  find  novel  matter.  Of  this  tendency  The 
Maid's  Tragedy  is  an  example,  as  well  as  of  the  moral 
laxity  that  marked  much  of  these  authors'  work.  The 
moral  values  are  not  preserved  with  the  absolute  health 
of  soul  which  is  Shakespeare's  greatest  glory,  but  are  apt 
to  be  blurred  or  distorted  in  the  endeavor  after  piquancy 
and  novelty.  But  it  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  con- 
ceive of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  in  this  merely  negative 
light  without  holding  in  mind  their  great  positive  quali- 
ties. They  are  "  absolute  lords  of  a  goodly  realm  of 
romance";  and  the  plays  that  go  under  their  common 
name,  for  splendor  and  charm  are  perhaps  not  to  be 
paralleled  in  any  single  body  of  Renaissance  drama  out- 
side of  that  of  Shakespeare  himself. 
After  Beaumont's  death  Fletcher  collaborated  with 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  151 

Massinger  and  others,  his  later  work  showing  a  tendency 
toward  the  comedy  of  manners  enlivened  by  witty  dia- 
logue, for  which  his  facile  genius  fitted  him. 

Of  the  life  of  Thomas  Dekker  almost  nothing  is  known. 
The  date  of  his  birth  is  guessed  to  be  between  1570  and 
1577,  and  he  is  entirely  lost  sight  of  a  few 
years  before  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War. 
But  his  individuality  is  so  distinctly  reflected 
in  his  plays  that  he  seems  one  of  the  most  definite  figures 
of  his  time — a  sunny,  light-hearted  nature,  full  of  real, 
even  if  somewhat  disorderly,  genius.  The  Shoemaker's 
Holiday  (written  before  1599),  perhaps  his  earliest  play, 
is  his  best.  It  is  a  study  of  London  apprentice  life,  woven 
about  a  slender  but  charming  love-story.  The  master- 
shoemaker,  Simon  Eyre,  and  his  wife,  Margery,  are 
drawn  writh  a  broad,  exuberant  humor  wholly  captivat- 
ing. The  Shoemaker's  Holiday  has  in  it  all  the  morning 
gladness  and  freshness  of  the  Elizabethan  temper.  Dek- 
ker wrote  one  other  charming  play,  Old  Fortunatus, 
a  dramatized  fairy-tale  of  the  wishing-hat  and  exhaust- 
less  purse.  It  is  a  chaotic  piece  of  work,  but  its  inco- 
herence rather  adds  to  than  detracts  from  the  dreamy 
nursery-tale  effect.  The  later  work  of  Dekker,  most  of 
it  done  in  collaboration  with  other  playwrights,  is  much 
more  serious,  showing  that  he,  too,  felt  the  reaction  from 
joyous  romance  which  brought  Shakespeare  into  his 
period  of  tragedy.  He  was  one  of  the  dramatists  whom 
Jonson  attacked,  in  The  Poetaster,  and  he  did  not  let  the 
quarrel  drop.  He  is,  indeed,  a  central  figure  in  the 
group  of  literary  bohemians  who  preserved,  in  the  gener- 
ation after  Shakespeare,  the  tradition  of  his  predecessors, 
with  their  scandals  and  quarrels,  their  freedom  of  life 
and  art. 

Thomas  Heywood  is  another  dramatist  whose  history 
is  almost  a  blank.  He  was  probably  born  about  the  same 
time  as  Dekker,  and  seems  to  have  been  alive  in  1648. 


152  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

His  life  therefore  spans  the  whole  period  of  the  drama 
from  Marlowe  to  Shirley.  He  was  immensely  productive, 
declaring  himself  to  have  had  "a  whole  hand 
or  a  main  fog61"  in  two  hundred  and  twenty 
plays."  He  must  in  fairness  be  judged  as  a 
dramatic  journalist,  in  an  age  when  the  theatre  tried  to  do 
what  the  newspaper  and  the  lecture  hall  now  accomplish, 
rather  than  as  a  dramatist  in  the  more  dignified  and  per- 
manent sense.  In  one  direction,  however,  Heywood 
achieved  mastery,  namely,  in  the  drama  of  simple  domes- 
tic life.  His  most  famous  play  of  this  nature  is  A  Woman 
Killed  -with  Kindness.  Here  for  once  Heywood  handled 
his  subject  with  noble  simplicity,  with  deep  tragic  effect, 
and  with  a  truth  and  sweetness  of  moral  tone  which  jus- 
tify Charles  Lamb's  saying  that  Heywood  is  "a  prose 
Shakespeare."  In  the  drama  of  domestic  life  mixed  with 
adventure,  Heywood  is  also  successful,  though  in  a  less 
supreme  degree.  Perhaps  the  best  example  of  this  type 
of  play  to  be  found  among  his  works  is  The  Fair  Maid  of 
the  West,  in  which  there  are  some  capital  vignettes  of  life 
in  an  English  seaport  town,  as  well  as  some  delightfully 
breezy  melodramatic  sea-fighting. 

Thomas  Middleton  (1570-1627)  was  a  man  of  much 
larger  caliber.  By  his  frank  contact  with  life  as  it  is,  and 
by  his  continual  effort  to  see  life  in  its  plain- 
Middteton.  ness  an^  entirety,  he  attained  at  last  to  a 
grasp  and  insight  which  place  him  among  the 
great  names  of  the  English  stage.  He  had  no  university 
training,  but  was  entered  at  Gray's  Inn  in  1596.  His  life 
about  the  law-courts  gave  him  an  intimate  knowledge  of 
the  shady  side  of  the  metropolis,  which  was  of  great  ser- 
vice to  him  when  he  began  to  write  realistic  comedies. 
Of  these  the  best  are  A  Trick  to  Catch  the  Old  One,  and 
The  Roaring  Girl,  written  with  Dekker.  His  transitioh 
from  comedy  to  tragedy  is  marked  by  the  very  interesting 
play  A  Fair  Quarrel,  in  which  the  noble  seriousness  of 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  153 

certain  scenes,  and  the  fine  dramatic  ring  of  the  verse, 
herald  the  approach  of  his  complete  maturity.  It  was 
between  1620  and  his  death  in  1627,  that  is,  when  over 
fifty,  that  he  wrote  the  two  plays,  The  Changeling  and 
Women  Beware  Women,  in  which  his  sturdy  powers  show 
themselves  fully  ripened. 

Both  The  Changeling  and  Women  Beware  Women  are 
unpleasant  in  plot,  and  marred  by  the  obtrusion  of  crude 
horrors.  They  go  back  in  fact  to  the  type  of 
drama  called  the  "tragedy  of  blood,"  of 
which  Thomas  Kyd's  Spanish  Tragedy,  Mar- 
lowe's Jew  of  Malta,  and  Shakespeare's  Titus  Andronicus 
are  examples.  Indeed,  Hamlet  and  Lear  are  really  in 
plot  tragedies  of  blood,  though  spiritualized  out  of  all 
inner  resemblance  to  the  species.  Middleton,  however, 
uses  horror  for  its  own  sake,  and  to  emphasize  situations 
already  strained  and  painful,  which  mar  the  two  plays. 
But  both  are  studded  with  fine  poetry,  fine  in  feeling  and 
supremely  fine  in  expression.  Middleton  learned,  better 
than  any  of  Shakespeare's  fellows,  the  secret  of  the  mas- 
ter's diction.  Without  imitating  the  Shakespearian 
manner,  he  handles  language,  at  his  best,  with  the  same 
superb  confidence;  and  this  is  true  of  his  comic  prose  as 
well  as  of  his  serious  blank  verse. 

In  John  Webster  we  encounter  the  phenomenon  of  a 
really  great  poet — one  who  in  sheer  power  of  expression 
comes  nearest  to  Shakespeare  of  all  the  men 
of  that  generation  except  Middleton — devot-  Webster, 
ing  himself  to  melodrama  of  the  most  gory 
and  unrestrained  description.  His  two  greatest  plays, 
The  White  Devil  and  The  Duchess  of  Malfi,  push  the 
devices  of  physical  horror  to  their  farthest  limit.  They 
show  the  tragedy  of  blood  in  its  most  developed  form, 
and  employ  all  the  grisly  paraphernalia  of  the  mad- 
house, the  graveyard,  and  the  shambles,  as  well  as  the 
sgencies  of  moral  terror,  to  wring  from  the  drama  all  the 


154  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

crude  excitement  it  is  capable  of  giving.  The  subject- 
matter  of  Webster,  therefore,  is  as  far  as  possible  from 
appealing  to  modern  taste.  But  his  power  of  conceiving 
character,  and  still  more  the  surprising  poetry,  now  wild 
and  stormy,  now  tender  and  lyrical,  now  pungently  epi- 
grammatic, which  he  puts  into  the  mouths  of  his  people, 
have  kept  his  fame  intact,  in  spite  of  the  repellent  form 
of  play  he  chose  to  exhibit  these  gifts  upon.  Of  the  two 
plays  named  above,  The  Duchess  of  Malfi  is,  the  finer. 
Webster  not  only  shows  in  it  a  much  firmer  stagecraft 
than  in  his  earlier  effort,  but  he  also  reveals  powers  of 
gayetv  and  playfulness,  and  an  understanding  of  the 
heart  hardly  to  be  looked  for  from  one  who  voluntarily 
elected  the  tragedy  of  blood  as  his  medium.  At  least 
two  of  the  characters,  the  Duchess  of  Main  and  her  hus- 
band Antonio,  are  robust  and  healthy  figures,  who  even 
under  the  stress  of  torture  keep  their  broad,  quiet  hu- 
manity. They  show  what  Webster  might  have  done  it 
he  had  been  born  under  a  luckier  star. 

In  John  Ford  (1586-1640?)  the  search  after  abnormal 

situations  reached  its  height  on  the  moral  and  spiritual 

side,  as  it  had  done  in  Webster  on  the  physi 

John  Ford.  .     .  .          _       .  . 

cal  side.  Ford  was  a  man  of  means,  not  com- 
pelled to  write  hastily  in  order  to  gain  an  uncertain  live- 
lihood from  the  stage.  His  plays  are  good  in  structure 
and  his  blank  verse  is  excellent.  But  while  his  work  shows 
no  sign  of  degeneration  in  respect  to  form,  his  deliberate 
turning  away  from  the  healthy  and  normal  in  human  life, 
and  the  strange  morbid  melancholy  which  shadows  his 
work,  betray  very  plainly  that  he  is  of  the  decadence. 
His  best  play  is  The  Broken  Heart. 

Early  in  the  history  of  the  drama,  war  began  between 
the  actors  and  the  Puritans.  In  1576  we  hear  of  strolling 
companies  being  kept  out  of  London  by  Puritan  law- 
makers; and  when  the  first  theatres  were  erected  they 
were  placed  in  the  suburbs  to  the  north,  and  in  the 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  155 

"liberties,"  or  exempt  lands,  across  the  Thames  in  South- 
wark.  Under  Queen  Elizabeth's  protection  the  actors 
grew  strong  enough  to  enter  the  city;  and  as 
long  as  her  hand  was  at  the  helm,  the  Puri-  War  between 
tans  did  not  assert  themselves  very  vigorously.  Puritans. 
But  when  James  I  came  to  the  throne,  with  his 
lack  of  personal  dignity,  his  bigoted  dictum  of  the  divine 
right  of  kings,  his  immoral  court  full  of  greedy  nobles 
from  Scotland  and  Spain,  the  Puritan  party  gained  rap- 
idly in  aggressiveness.  The  thing  which  the  Puritans 
hated  most  under  the  sun,  after  copes  and  crucifixes,  was 
the  theatre,  because  it  was  in  the  theatre  that  the  "lust 
of  the  eye  and  the  pride  of  life"  found  fullest  expression. 
Naturally,  therefore,  as  the  Puritan  disapproval  grew 
more  severe,  the  dramatists  drew  away  from  the  London 
burgesses,  and  appealed  in  the  tone  and  matter  of  their 
plays  more  and  more  to  the  corrupt  taste  of  the  court — 
a  fact  to  which  the  rapid  degeneration  of  the  drama  was 
in  large  part  due. 

It  has  been  thought  from  certain  passages  in  the  plays 
c;f  Philip  Massinger  (1583-1640),  as  well  as  from  their 
general  tone,  that  he  was  at  heart  a  Puritan, 
not  in  the  narrow  political  sense,  but  as  the  Massinger. 
term  applies  to  men  of  high  moral  ideals,  to 
whom  the  things  that  make  for  righteousness  are  the  first 
concern,  and  the  shows  and  passions  of  life,  by  compari- 
son, unreal.  By  some  ironic  fate  Massinger  was  born  a 
dramatic  poet  at  a  time  when  the  stage,  to  live  at  all,  had 
to  appeal  to  the  jaded  taste  of  a  court.  He  spins  his 
plots  of  worldly  passion  and  ambition,  but  without  real 
interest  in  them.  When  wickedness  is  required  he  forces 
his  characters  duly  into  wickedness,  and  in  the  effort  to 
overcome  the  bias  of  his  mind  makes  them  very  wicked 
indeed.  But  it  is  when  he  has  a  chance  to  treat  some 
theme  of  self-sacrifice,  of  loyalty,  of  gratitude,  of  un- 
worldly renunciation  in  the  interest  of  an  ideal,  as  in  The 


156  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

Great  Duke  of  Florence,  The  Virgin  Martyr,  and  The  Maid 
of  Honour,  that  he  shows  himself  to  be  a  real  poet,  and 
handles  his  subject  with  placid  dignity  and  power.  He 
also  achieved  at  least  one  great  success  in  comedy,  in  his 
New  Way  to  Pay  Old  Debts.  The  character  of  the  miser 
and  extortioner  in  this  play.  Sir  Giles  Overreach,  holds  a 
place  among  the  classic  figures  of  the  English  stage. 

The  great  procession  of  dramatic  poets  which  begins 
with  Marlowe  comes  to  an  end  with  James  Shirley  (1596- 
1666).  In  him  we  detect  a  constant  attempt 
^-o  e^e  ou^  n*s  own  scanty  invention  by  imi- 
tating his  predecessors.  His  work  has,  in 
other  words,  the  ''literary"  quality,  as  distinguished 
from  original  inspiration.  This  criticism,  however,  ap- 
plies chiefly  to  his  tragedies.  In  comedy  he  followed  the 
realistic  type  known  as  the  comedy  of  manners,  and 
brought  it  very  near  to  the  style  of  the  Restoration.  In 
Hyde  Park  (1637)  it  would  take  only  a  slight  change  here 
and  there  to  convince  us  that  we  are  among  the  gallants 
and  dames  of  the  time  of  Charles  II,  or  even  of  Queen 
Anne.  The  dialogue  is  in  prose,  the  language  perfectly 
every-day  and  realistic;  instead  of  the  long  monologues 
and  rhetorical  passages  of  the  earlier  romantic  comedy, 
there  is  a  quick  bandying  of  the  shuttlecock  of  talk. 
The  tone  is  that  of  a  frivolous,  gossipy  age,  not  much  in 
earnest  about  anything,  and  given  over  to  the  cult  of 
fashion. 

When  we  remember  that  Hyde  Park  was  written  on  the 
eve  of  the  most  tremendous  upheaval  which  English 
society  has  ever  witnessed,  this  frivolity  of  tone  becomes 
significant.  It  marks  the  point  of  extreme  departure 
from  the  Puritan  temper.  So  long  as  the  dramatists 
were  in  earnest,  even  in  the  portrayal  of  those  things' 
which  to  the  Puritan  mind  were  abominations,  there  was 
a  bond  of  sympathy.  What  the  Puritan  could  not  stand 
was  the  gay  insincerity,  the  airy  trifling  with  the  essential 


SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  157 

facts  of  life,  such  as  Shirley's  comedies  exemplify.  After 
the  election  of  the  Long  Parliament,  the  Puritan  party 
quickly  came  to  a  reckoning  with  the  theatre.  In  1641 
appeared  a  pamphlet  called  The  Stage-Players'  Com- 
plaint, which  says  pathetically:  "The  High  Commission 
Court  is  down,  the  Star-Chamber  is  down,  and  some 
think  Bishops  will  down;  but  why  should  not  we  then 
that-  are  far  inferior  to  any  of  these,  justly  fear  that  we 
should  be  down  too?"  In  September  of  1642  an  ordi- 
nance of  both  Houses  of  Parliament  closed  the  theatres 
throughout  the  kingdom.  They  were  not  reopened  until 
eighteen  years  later,  when  the  reins  of  power  had  fallen 
from  the  dead  hand  of  Cromwell,  and  Charles  II  ascended 
the  throne  from  which  his  father  had  been  led  to  the 
scaffold. 


CHAPTER   VIII 

THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY:   NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE 
BEFORE    THE   RESTORATION 


THE  non-dramatic  literature  of  the  early  seventeenth 
century  shows  in  broad  markings  the  same  opposing 

forces  which  we  discover  in  the  drama — on 
The  the  one  hand,  assertion  of  the  right  of  the 

century!11*      individual  to  do  as  he  pleased  in  life  and  in 

art;  on  the  other,  insistence  on  the  importance 
in  both  of  order,  restraint,  and  adherence  to  standards. 
On  the  one  hand  the  romantic  impulse  tended  to  outdo 
itself  in  a  quest  for  novelty  and  excitement  of  experience; 
and  on  the  other,  a  classic  taste  was  gaining  strength, 
partly  by  virtue  of  reaction  from  the  excesses  of  the 
romanticists.  It  is  characteristic  of  the  confusion  and 
shifting  currents  of  the  time  that  there  is  little  unity  of 
practice  between  art  and  life.  The  Cavalier  poets,  some 
of  whom,  in  conduct,  were  true  children  of  the  Renais- 
sance, sons  of  Belial,  tended  toward  the  restrained  and 
even  workmanship  of  Ben  Jonson,  while  the  religious 
poets,  whose  lives  were  saintly,  wrote  with  an  extrava- 
gance that  seems  the  extremity  of  wilfulness  and  whim. 
It  was  indeed  an  age  of  uncertainty  and  transition,  both 
in  literature  and  in  political  and  social  life. 

There  are  many  striking  differences  between  this  age 
and  the  great  era  which  went  before.  In  the  first  place, 
Differences  tne  splencud  sense  of  national  unity,  of  whic'h 
from  the  devotion  to  Elizabeth  was  the  symbol,  was 

lost*     Under  ner  successor,  the  Scotch  King, 

James  I,  party  strife  between  the  supporters 
of  the  King  and  those  who  maintained  the  rights  of  the 
people  through  Parliament,  between  those  who  held  to 
158 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  159 

the  authority  of  the  established  church  and  its  bishops, 
•and  those  who  demanded  a  more  democratic  form  of 
church  government  or  even  entire  freedom  of  the  indi- 
vidual in  matters  of  conscience,  increased,  until  in  the 
next  reign  it  resulted  in  civil  war.  In  the  second  place, 
the  great  conceptions,  philosophical,  political,  and  social, 
that  had  marked  the  preceding  age,  gave  way  and  dis- 
appeared. One  of  these  was  that  of  an  ideal  union  be- 
tween the  interests  of  the  Renaissance  and  those  of  the 
Reformation,  between  the  claims  of  this  world  and  those 
of  the  other,  which,  in  the  case  of  Spenser  and  Sidney, 
made  for  a  complete  and  thoroughly  developed  human- 
ity. Instead,  we  have  in  the  seventeenth  century,  on 
>';he  one  hand,  the  attractive  but  immoral  Cavaliers,  and 
on  the  other  the  impressive  but  intolerant  Puritans — 
followers  of  two  utterly  opposed  views  of  life.  In  the 
lack  of  great  conceptions,  human  ambition  and  human 
character  became  less  splendid  and  unified.  In  place  of 
Marlowe,  Shakespeare,  and  Raleigh,  we  have  Jonson, 
Bacon,  and  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury.  Milton  and  the 
great  Puritans  are  obvious  exceptions,  but  Milton  illus- 
trates the  personal  tragedy  of  the  loss  of  Spenser's 
breadth  of  view  in  life  and  character.  Above  all,  the 
imaginative  appeal  of  the  new  world  beyond  the  sea  had 
become  dulled;  America  was  no  longer  a  field  for  Ra- 
leigh's search  for  Eldorado,  or  a  background  for  The 
Tempest,  but  rather  a  place  for  colonization  and  trade. 
There  were,  it  is  true,  compensations.  If  human  charac- 
ter was  less  grandiose  than  among  the  Elizabethans,  it 
was  much  more  self-conscious  and  curious.  If  the  men 
of  the  seventeenth  century  were  essentially  smaller,  at 
least  they  left  much  fuller  record  of  themselves,  in  biog- 
raphy and  autobiography.  If  the  world  v/as  less  spacious 
and  less  inviting  to  bold  exploration  and  speculation,  it 
was,  on  the  other  hand,  a  possible  field  for  exploitation 
and  patient  investigation.  If  Eldorado  disappeared, 


160  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

trade  expanded;  and  while  imagination  grew  weary,  sci- 
ence was  born.  A  practical  sense  of  realities  of  life,  tes- 
tified to  by  the  realistic  studies  in  the  drama,  was  begin- 
ning to  be  felt.  Here  again  the  transcendental  vision  cf 
the  Puritan  and  his  absorption  in  the  eternities  are  an 
obvious  exception;  but  it  is  one  of  the  eccentricities  of 
the  period  that  the  Puritan,  with  all  his  intense  concern 
with  the  other  world,  should  have  had  so  strong  a  prac- 
tical sense  of  the  values  of  this  one. 

A  final  difference  between  the  two  periods  is  present 
everywhere  in  the  literatures  of  both,  in  drama,  sermon, 
and  song.  The  age  of  Elizabeth  was  one  of  sunshine  and 
joy,  of  enthusiasm,  of  confidence  in  this  world  and  the 
next.  The  early  seventeenth  century  was  one  of  shadows 
and  forebodings,  of  melancholy  and  depression.  To  pass 
from  one  to  another  is  like  passing  from  a  plain  bright 
with  sunshine  into  the  twilight  of  a  forest.  The  clouds 
gathering  in  the  political  sky,  the  theology  of  Calvin  and 
the  Puritans,  with  its  dark  view  of  man's  future,  account 
sufficiently  for  this  change,  but  it  is  perhaps  further  to 
be  explained  as  one  of  those  periodic  reactions  of  human 
nature,  which,  weary  and  sated  with  joy  and  excitement, 
readily  falls  prey  to  melancholy  and  fear.  The  difference 
is  easily  seen  in  the  late  drama,  where  shapes  of  evil  and 
horror  haunted  men's  fancy,. and  in  other  literature,  where 
death  challenges  love  as  the  theme  calling  out  the  high- 
est eloquence.  Even  the  attempts  of  comedians  and 
Cavaliers  to  throw  off  this  prevailing  mood,  in  their  hec- 
tic gayety  and  persistent  trifling,  are  a  witness  to  its 
power,  and  often  are  followed  by  a  reaction  to  religious 
contemplation,  ecstatic  or  gloomy. 

Of  the  two  great  transition  figures  who  stand  between 
the  two  periods,  Ben  Jonson  has  already  been  considered. 
The  other,  Francis  Bacon,  was  born  in  1561,  three  years 
before  Shakespeare.  His  father  was  Lord  Keeper  of  the 
Great  Seal  to  Elizabeth,  and  his  uncle  was  Lord  Burleigh, 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  l6l 

Elizabeth's  prime  minister.  He  was  thus  marked  out  by 
birth  for  a  public  career;  and  he  threw  himself  into  the 
strife  for  place  with  the  keen  intellectual 
zest  and  the  moral  ruthlessness  characteristic  Bacon;  His 
of  the  Renaissance  courtier.  Owing  to  the  character, 
opposition  of  his  jealous  uncle,  he  got  little 
preferment  under  the  Queen;  but  under  James  I  he 
rose  rapidly  through  various  offices  to  be  Lord  Chancel- 
lor, with  the  title  of  Viscount  Saint  Albans.  In  this  po- 
sition he  supported  his  dignities  by  a  magnificence  of  liv- 
ing altogether  out  of  proportion  to  his  legitimate  income. 
In  1621  he  was  impeached  before  the  House  of  Lords 
for  bribe-taking  and  corruption  in  office,  found  guilty, 
and  subjected  to  fine  and  imprisonment.  He  retired,  a 
broken  and  ruined  man,  to  his  country  seat  of  Gorham- 
bury,  and  spent  the  remaining  five  years  of  his  life  in  sci- 
entific and  philosophic  pursuits;  still,  however,  keeping 
up  a  show  of  his  former  magnificence,  with  an  unconquer- 
able pride  which  caused  Prince  Charles  to  exclaim:  "This 
man  scorns  to  go  out  in  a  snuff !" 

For  Bacon's  personal  character  it  is  impossible  to  feel 
much  admiration.     He  exhibited  nearly  all  the  unworthy 
traits   of   the   Renaissance  politician — greed, 
ostentation,    heartlessness,    and    lax    public    ^"Pr^. 
morality.     But  it  is  equally  impossible  not    gramme"; 

,     .        ,  .  .  ii-  •    j       the  Inductive 

to  admire  his  spacious  and  luminous  mind,  System. 
and  the  devotion  to  pure  thought  which  con- 
stituted his  deeper  life.  In  a  letter  written  at  the  outset 
of  his  career  he  says  proudly:  "I  confess  that  I  have  as 
vast  contemplative  ends  as  I  have  moderate  civil  ends; 
for  I  have  taken  all  knowledge  to  be  my  province."  In 
pursuance  of  this  majestic  programme  he  sketched  out 
a  work  which  was  to  have  been  called  the  Instauratio 
Magna,  the  object  of  which  was  to  present  a  complete 
view  of  knowledge  as  it  existed  in  his  day,  and  a  guide 
for  its  further  progress.  Of  the  six  books  only  one, 


l62  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

known  as  the  Novum  Organum,  reached  anything  like; 
definite  shape;  the  Advancement  of  Learning  (written  also 
in  Latin  as  De  Augments  Scientiarum)  was  intended  as 
an  introduction  to  the  whole.  The  instrument  by  which 
science  was  to  complete  its  conquest  was  the  application 
of  the  principle  of  inductive  reasoning,  by  which  the  ob 
servation  of  specific  facts  leads  up  to  the  formulation  of 
general  laws.  In  the  old  scholastic  system  of  deduction, 
general  principles  had  been  first  laid  down,  and  particular 
facts  had  been  explained  in  the  light  of  these  principles. 
In  the  latter  case,  since  theory  rested  on  no  actual  experi . 
ence.  the  explanations  flowing  therefrom  had  for  the 
most  part  been  fantastic  and  untrue.  The  change  in 
method  had  to  come  with  the  rise  of  the  scientific  spirit ; 
it  is  Bacon's  glory  that  he  saw  and  expressed  the  vitaJ 
need  of  change,  before  the  scientific  spirit  had  yet  grown, 
conscious  of  itself. 

All  this  marks  Bacon  as  a  man  of  the  Renaissance, 
exulting  in  the  grandest  conceptions  and  undaunted  by 

the  most  daring  enterprises.  This  mood  ha 
Atlantis?."*  never  entirely  lost.  One  of  his  last  writings 

was  a  sketch  of  an  ideal  commonwealth  be- 
yond the  sea,  called  The  New  Atlantis,  It  resembles  Sir 
Thomas  More's  Utopia,  with  perhaps  this  significant  dif- 
ference— that  while  the  inhabitants  of  Utopia  owe  their 
happy  state  to  the  operation  of  reason,  those  of  Atlantis 
owe  theirs  to  study  and  experiment.  The  centre  of  their 
commonwealth  is  a  learned  academy  known  as  Solomon's 
House,  and  they  despatch  vessels  yearly  to  bring  them 
reports  of  inventions  and  discoveries  throughout  the 
world.  A  more  practical  Utopia  this  than  Sir  Thomas 
More's,  and  yet  a  dream. 

Bacon's  interest  in  the  world  as  it  actually  was  is 
The  shown   by    the   Essays— "  dispersed    medita- 

"Essays."        tions,"  he  calls  them,  or  memoranda.    As  such 

they  were  first  published  (then  ten  in  number) 
in  X597>  in  the  author's  thirty-sixth  year.  Fifteen 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  163 

later  they  were  issued  again,  with  additions;  and  in  1625, 
a  year  before  Bacon's  death,  they  were  put  forth  in  final 
form,  the  essays  now  numbering  fifty-eight,  the  old  ones 
revised  and  expanded.  It  is  clear  that  their  charm  grew 
upon  Bacon,  and  urged  him,  half  against  his  will,  to  put 
more  and  more  serious  effort  into  the  manipulation  of  a 
language  for  which  he  had  no  great  respect,  yet  of  which 
he  is  one  of  the  greatest  masters. 

Even  in  their  finished  state  the  Essays  are  desultory 
and    suggestive,    rather    than    coherent    or    exhaustive. 
They  deal  with  many  subjects,  of  public  and 
private  conduct,  of  statecraft,  of  the  nature 
and   value   of   human   passions    and    human  Matter, 

relations;  and  with  these  graver  themes  are 
intermingled  others  of  a  lighter  sort,  on  building,  on  the 
planting  of  gardens,  on  the  proper  mounting  and  acting 
of  masques  and  other  scenic  displays.  To  a  modern 
understanding  those  which  deal  with  the  deeper  questions 
of  human  nature  are  apt  to  seem  somewhat  shallow  and 
worldly  wise.  We  get  from  them  little  real  vision,  few 
generous  points  of  view;  everywhere  we  find  wit,  keen 
observation,  grave  or  clever  mundane  judgments.  Now 
and  again,  to  be  sure,  Bacon  startles  us  with  an  altogether 
unworldly  sentence,  such  as  this:  "Little  do  men  per- 
ceive what  solitude  is,  and  how  far  it  extendeth,  for  a 
crowd  is  not  company,  and  faces  are  but  a.  gallery  of  pic- 
tures, and  talk  but  a  tinkling  cymbal,  where  there  is  no 
love."  Some  of  the  essays,  such  as  that  entitled  "Of 
Great  Place,"  show  an  unworldly  wisdom  which,  if  ap- 
plied to  Bacon's  own  life,  would  have  made  it  a  very 
different  thing.  Not  seldom,  too,  he  lifts  the  curtain 
upon  that  inner  passion  of  his  existence,  the  thirst  for  in- 
tellectual truth,  which  made  him  noble  in  spite  of  the 
shortcomings  of  his  character.  "  Truth,"  he  says,  "  which 
only  doth  judge  itself  ...  is  the  sovereign  good  of 
human  nature."  But  for  the  most  part  their  mood  is 
one  of  practical  and  sometimes  cynical  worldliness.  Of 


1 64  A   HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

"Marriage  and  Single  Life"  he  says:  "He  that  hath  wife 
and  children  hath  given  hostages  to  fortune." 

Bacon  shows  himself  in  the  Essays  to  be  a  consummate 
rhetorician.  He  made  for  himself  a  style  which,. though 
not  quite  flexible  and  modern,  was  unmatch- 
able  for  pith  and  pregnancy  in  the  convey- 
ance of  his  special  kind  of  thought.  Though  a  devoted 
Latinist,  and  using  a  much  Latinized  vocabulary,  he  saw 
the  structural  differences  of  the  two  languages  so  clearly 
that,  when  the  bulk  of  English  prose  was  being  written 
in  loose  sentences  of  enormous  length,  he  struck  out  at 
once  a  thoroughly  English  type  of  sentence,  short,  crisp, 
and  firmly  knit.  He  rejected  the  conceitfulness  and 
overcrowded  imagery  of  the  Euphuists,  but  knew  how 
to  light  up  his  thought  with  well-placed  figure,  and  to 
give  to  it  an  imaginative  glow  and  charm  upon  occasion, 
contrasting  strongly  with  the  unfigurative  style  of  Ben 
Jonson,  who  represents  in  his  prose  the  extreme  revulsion 
from  Euphuism.  For  the  student  of  expression  Bacon's 
essays  are  of  endless  interest  and  profit;  the  more  one 
reads  them  the  more  remarkable  seem  their  compactness 
and  their  nervous  vitality.  They  shock  a  sluggish  atten- 
tion into  wakefulness,  as  if  by  an  electric  contact;  and 
though  they  may  sometimes  fail  to  nourish,  they  can 
never  fail  to  stimulate. 

A  more  thotoughly  characteristic  figure  of  the  period  is 
John  Donne  (1573-1631).     Born  a  Roman  Catholic,  he 

John  Donne  was  sent  wn^e  very  young  to  Oxford,  and 
then  plunged  into  the  bohemian  life  of  Lon- 
don. Apparently  to  break  off  an  illicit  love-affair,  he 
was  sent  with  Essex  on  the  expedition  to  Cadiz  in  1596, 
an  enterprise  that  ranked  for  daring  with  the  repulse  of 
the  Armada,  and  then  returned  to  become  secretary  to 
Lord  Keeper  Ellesmere.  Before  this  he  had  written  a 
body  of  poetry  whkh,  though  not  published  until  after 
his  death,  circulate!!  in  manuscript,  and  like  Wyatt's  and 
Surrey's,  had  an  immense  influence  on  younger  poets. 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  1 6$ 

Part  of  this  poetry  takes  classical  form  as  satires,  elegies, 
and  epistles — though  in  the  state  in  which  it  has  reached 
us  it  has  anything  but  classical  smoothness — and  part  is 
written  in  lyrical  forms  of  extraordinary  variety.  Most 
of  it  purports  to  deal  with  life,  descriptively  or  experi- 
mentally; and  the  first  thing  to  strike  the  reader  is  Donne's 
extraordinary  frankness  and  penetrating  realism.  The 
next  is  his  cynicism.  His  love-poems,  \vith  a  few  excep- 
tions, show  the  reverse  of  the  Elizabethan  attitude.  His 
view  of  love  is  physical;  he  curses  his  mistress  instead  of 
praising  her;  and  unlike  the  passionate  sonneteer,  he  sets 
up  inconstancy  as  his  ideal  of  conduct. 

It  may  readily  be  surmised  how  this  astonishing  new 
poetry  took  the  literary  cliques  of  London  by  storm. 
But  as  striking  as  the  novelty  of  subject-mat- 
ter and  point  of  view  is  that  of  its  form.  In- 
stead  of  the  unvarying  succession  of  sonnets, 
Donne  gives  nearly  every  theme  a  verse  and  stanza  form 
peculiar  to  itself;  and  instead  of  decorating  his  theme  by 
conventional  comparisons,  he  tries  to  illumine  or  empha- 
size his  thought  by  far-fetched  metaphors  and  extrava- 
gant hyperboles.  In  moments  of  inspiration  his  style 
becomes  wonderfully  poignant  and  direct,  heart-search- 
ing in  its  simple  human  accents,  with  an  originality  and 
force  for  which  we  look  in  vain  among  the  clear  and 
fluent  melodies  of  Elizabethan  lyrists.  Unfortunately, 
these  moments  are  comparatively  rare.  Too  often  the 
''conceits,"  as  these  extravagant  figures  are  called,  are 
so  odd  that  we  lose  sight  of  the  thing  to  be  illustrated,  in 
the  startling  nature  of  the  illustration.  With  him  love 
is  a  spider  which,  dropped  into  the  wine  of  life,  turns  it 
to  poison;  or  it  is  a  cannon-ball: 

By  him,  as  by  chain'd  shot,  whole  ranks  do  die; 
or  it  is  a  devouring  fish: 

He  is  the  tyrant  pike,  our  hearts  the  fry. 


1 66  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

This  fashion  of  conceitful  writing,  somewhat  like  eu- 
phuism in  prose,  appeared  in  Italy  and  Spain  also.  It 
was  the  peculiar  disease  of  romantic  poetry,  as  stereo- 
typed form  and  conventional  poetic  diction  were  of 
classic. 

About  1 60 1  Donne  fell  passionately  and  seriously  in 
love  with  the  niece  of  the  Lord  Keeper,  married  her,  and 
was  imprisoned  for  a  time  by  his  angry  fatrrer- 
LatereLife  in-law.  For  several  years  after  his  release  he 
supported  his  family  by  a  somewhat  undigni- 
fied resort  to  patronage;  then,  at  the  King's  persuasion, 
he  entered  the  church,  where  he  rose  rapidly  to  be  Dean  of 
Saint  Paul's,  and  the  most  famous  preacher  of  his  time. 
After  the  death  of  his  wife  he  fell  more  and  more  under 
the  shadow  of  a  terrible  spiritual  gloom.  Even  in  his 
early  Songs  and  Sonnets,  the  thought  of  death  often 
appears  with  gruesome  realism,  as  in  The  Relic: 

When  my  grave  is  broken  up  again 
Some  second  guest  to  entertain, 


And  he  that  digs  it  spies 

A  bracelet  of  bright  hair  about  the  bone, 

Will  he  not  let  us  alone? 

In  his  sermons  it  is  realized  in  its  physical  aspects  with 
terrible  intensity.  As  his  life  drew  near  its  close  he  had 
himself  sculptured  in  his  winding-sheet,  standing  upright 
in  his  coffin,  and  this  monument  was  placed  above  his 
grave  in  Saint  Paul's. 

George  Herbert  (1593-1632),  like  Donne,  published  lit-' 
tie  or  no  poetry  in  his  lifetime.  After  a  youth  spent  in 
George  preparation  for  a  court  career,  and  some  years 

Herbert.          °f  disappointed  waiting  for  court  favors,  he 
entered   the  church.     Once  within  the  pale 
of  the  religious  life,  he  felt  the  full  force  of  that  spiritual 
agitation  and  awe  which  sooner  or  later  overtook  ali 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  167 

serious  minds  in  the  first  half  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
After  two  years  of  devoted  labor  as  a  parish  priest  at 
Bemerton,  near  Salisbury,  he  was  stricken  with  a  mortal 
malady.  On  his  death-bed  he  handed  to  Nicholas  Ferrar 
a  bundle  of  manuscript,  asking  him  to  read  it,  and  then 
to  use  it  or  destroy  it,  as  seemed  to  him  fit.  The  volume 
was  published  the  next  year  under  the  title  of  The  Tem- 
ple, in  allusion  to  the  scriptural  verse,  "In  His  temple 
doth  every  man  speak  in  His  honor."  It  is  a  curious 
picture  of  the  conflict  which  Herbert  went  through,  while 
subjecting  his  will  and  his  worldly  ambition  to  the  sendee 
of  God. 

Herbert  pushed  even  further  than  Donne  the  use  of 
conceits.  Many  of  his  poems  are  mere  bundles  of  these 
oddities  of  metaphor,  quaint  and  crabbed  to  the  last  de- 
gree. But  he  manages,  by  means  of  them,  to  express 
many  pregnant  and  far-reaching  thoughts.  At  times  he 
j  hows  an  unusual  power  of  direct  and  familiar  phrasing. 
By  means  of  sudden  turns,  emphatic  pauses,  tightning- 
Jike  "stabs"  of  thought,  he  forces  home  his  words  into 
f;he  reader's  memory,  and  makes  his  quaint  and  daring 
conceitfulness  interpret,  rather  than  obscure,  his  meaning. 

The  pervading  atmosphere  of  Herbert's  poetry  is  one 
of  moral  earnestness  and  sincere  piety,  rather  intellectual 
than  impassioned.  He  is,  therefore,  the  true 
poet  of  the  Church  of  England.  Richard  crashaw. 
Crashaw  (i6i2?-i649?),  on  the  other  hand, 
is  the  poet  of  Catholicism.  His  attitude  toward  divine 
things  is  not  that  of  pious  contemplation,  but  of  ecstatic 
and  mystical  worship.  His  religious  sense  is  southern 
rather  than  northern.  The  Reformation,  as  such,  did 
not  affect  him.  It  served  merely  to  kindle  into  intense 
flame  his  devotion  to  the  older  church.  This  is  the  more 
curious  because  of  the  fact  that  Crashaw's  youth  and 
early  nurture  were  of  an  ultraprotestant  sort.  At  the 
college  of  Peterhouse  in  Cambridge,  however,  he  read 


1 68  A   HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

deeply  in  the  works  of  the  early  church  fathers  and  in  the 
lives  of  the  saints,  and  he  took  part  in  the  fasts  and  vigils 
of  a  religious  brotherhood  gathered  about  Nicholas  Ferrar 
at  Little  Gidding,  just  outside  Cambridge.  His  religious 
poetry,  written  at  this  time,  recognizes  the  influence  of 
George  Herbert  in  the  title  Steps  to  the  Temple.  As  the 
struggle  between  the  Church  of  England  and  the  Puritan 
dissenters  grew  more  and  more  bitter,  he  fled  for  refuge 
to  the  arms  of  that  venerable  mother  church  of  which 
his  nature  had  from  the  first  made  him  a  member.  He 
was  exiled  by  Cromwell's  government;  and  after  a  time 
of  bitter  poverty  in  Paris,  he  was  befriended  by  a  brother 
poet,  Abraham  Cowley,  and  introduced  to  Queen  Henri- 
etta Maria,  wife  of  Charles  I,  who  had  taken  refuge  at 
the  court  of  France  from  the  storms  of  civil  war  in  Eng- 
land. Through  her  influence  with  a  Roman  cardinal, 
Crashaw  was  given  a  place  in  the  Monastery  of  Our  Lady 
of  Loretto,  in  Italy;  and  he  died  shortly  after,  from  the 
effect  of  a  pilgrimage  which  he  made  on  foot  in  the  burn- 
ing heat  of  the  Italian  summer — a  fit  end  for  a  poet  in 
whom  lived  again  the  mystical  religious  fervor  of  the 
Middle  Ages. 

Crashaw's  poetry  is  excessively  uneven.  It  contains 
the  most  extravagant  examples  of  frigid  conceitfulness  to 
be  found  among  all  the  followers  of  Donne;  yet  side  by 
side  with  these,  often  in  the  same  poem,  occur  passages 
of  noble  distinction.  His  two  most  characteristic  poems 
are  perhaps  "The  Flaming  Heart"  and  the  "Hymn  to 
Saint  Theresa."  He  sings  the  raptures  of  the  soul  visited 
by  divine  love,  in  terms  as  concrete  and  glowing  as  any 
human  lover  has  ever  used  to  celebrate  an  earthly  pas- 
sion. An  ethereal  music,  and  a  kind  of  luminous  haze, 
both  reminding  us  of  Shelley's  work,  are  the  distinguish- 
ing features  of  his  poetry  at  its  best.  At  the  close  of  his 
poem  entitled  "  Description  of  a  Religious  House,"  we 
find  the  lines: 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  169 

The  self-remembering  soul  sweetly  recovers 

Her  kindred  with  the  stars,  and  meditates  her  immortal  way 

Home  to  the  original  source  of  light  and  intellectual  day. 

This  is  the  key  to  Crashaw's  imaginative  world.  He  is 
like  a  moth  fluttering  in  the  radiance  which  streams  from 
the  "source  of  light  and  intellectual  day." 

Henry  Vaughan  (1621-1695),  the  third  poet  of  this 
group,  spent  his  youth  among  the  romantic  glens  of  the 
valley  of  the  Usk,  in  northern  Wales.  Here 
was  the  legendary  seat  of  King  AYthur's  court; 
and  here,  tradition  says,  Shakespeare  heard 
from  the  lips  of  the  country  folk  the  name  and  doings  of 
Puck,  before  writing  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream. 
Vaughan  went  up  to  Oxford  in  1638,  just  as  the  quarrel 
between  the  King  and  the  Parliament  was  drawing  to  a 
head.  He  fought  for  the  King's  cause,  and  when  that 
cause  was  lost,  retired  to  his  native  valley  in  Wales,  to 
spend  the  rest  of  his  long  life  as  an  obscure  country  doc- 
tor. The  death  of  his  wife  and  his  own  severe  illness 
awakened  his  religious  nature,  and  under  the  influence 
of  Herbert's  Temple  he  wrote  and  published  (1650)  the 
first  part  of  Silex  Scintillans,  or  Sparks  from  a  Flint-stone, 
that  is,  sparks  struck  by  divine  grace  from  a  hard  and 
sinful  heart. 

Vaughan's  poetry,  like  Crashaw's,  is  very  uneven. 
The  reader  must  search  long  before  finding  the  things  of 
value,  but  when  found  they  are  worth  the  search.  His 
best  poems,  such  as  "The  World,"  "Departed  Friends," 
and  "The  Hidden  Flower,"  show  an  extraordinary  insight 
into  the  mystical  life  of  nature  and  of  the  heart,  and  a 
strange  nearness  to  the  unseen  world.  No  English  poet 
has  touched  the  deeper  mysteries  with  more  childlike 
simplicity  and  unconsciousness,  nor  with  a  more  delicate 
and  elusive  music. 

The  poets  just  discussed  may,  by  virtue  of  their  kin- 
ship in  style  and  in  metrical  form,  be  called  the  school 


7  70 


A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 


of  Donne.  Another  group  may  equally  well  be  entitled 
the  school  of  Spenser,  since  they  employ  a  modification 
of  the  Spenserian  stanza  for  narrative  po- 
of Spenser:  etry,  and  otherwise  resemble  him  in  features 
Giles  of  style,  such  as  use  of  figures  of  speech,  espe- 

cially personifications.  Above  all.  they  have 
the  color  and  music  of  his  verse.  Of  these  the  chief  was 
Giles  Fletcher  (1588-1623),  whose  epic  entitled  Christ's 
Victory  and  Triumph  on  Earth  and  in  Heaven  is,  for  all 
its  quaintness  of  thought  and  phrase,  no  unworthy  fore- 
runner of  Paradise  Lost.  It  was  published  in  1610,  when 
Milton  was  two  years  old.  Signs  of  its  influence  upon 
Milton  can  he  traced  from  his  early  "Hymn  on  the  Na- 
tivity" to  the  Paradise  Regained  of  his  old  age.  The  last 
canto,  which  deals  with  the  resurrection  and  with  the  en- 
trance of  Christ  into  heaven,  is  the  most  beautiful  part 
of  the  poem.  It  is  a  great  Easter  hymn,  expressing  the 
joy  of  earthly  and  heavenly  things  over  the  risen  Re- 
deemer. The  sympathy  with  nature  which  it  reveals  is 
exquisite,  resembling  Chaucer's  in  its  childlike  delight 
and  sweetness,  but  filled  with  a  religious  ecstasy  which 
Chaucer's  worldliness  excluded. 

An  older  brother  of  Giles,  Phineas  Fletcher  (1582-1650), 
followed  Spenser  in  writing  a  series  of  eclogues  based  on 
his  life  at  Cambridge,  but  instead  of  intro- 
Fiet°her.  ducing  the  conventional  type  of  rustic,  the 
shepherd,  he  made  his  characters  fishermen, 
whence  his  title,  Piscatory  Eclogues.  Like  Spenser  he 
made  his  masterpiece  an  allegory,  but  instead  of  figuring 
forth  the  moral  life  of  man  he  devotes  himself  to  an  end- 
less account  of  man's  physical  and  physiological  nature 
under  the  metaphor  of  an  island-city.  The  Purple  Island 
is  a  stock  example  of  the  absurdities  of  the  allegorical 
school,  but  it  suggests,  also,  the  interest  of  the  time  in 
science. 

William  Browne  (1500-1645)  and  George  Wither  (1588-    , 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  171 

1667)  continued  the  pastoral  tradition  of  the  school  of 
Spenser;  and  like  Spenser  they  vitalized  the  conventions 
of  pastoral  verse  by  breathing  into  them  a 
sincere  feeling  for  nature,  and  by  making  them 
convey,  under  a  playful  disguise,  a  certain 
amount  of  ethical  and  religious  thought.  Browne's  Brit- 
tamo's  Pastorals  gives  us  the  homely  sights  and  sounds  of 
Devonshire  in  a  way  which  makes  his  pages  charming  in 
spite  of  their  sentimentality,  their  false  mythology,  and 
their  strained  allegory.  Wither's  Mistress  of  Philerete  is 
a  celebration  of  Virtue,  whom  the  poet  personifies  and 
praises  exactly  as  if  she  were  some  lovely  shepherdess  of 
the  plain.  Both  these  poets  passed  beyond  the  range  of 
the  Spenserian  tradition.  Browne  was  the  author  of  the 
epitaph  long  attributed  to  Ben  Jonson,  and  still  regarded 
as  an  epitome  of  the  classic  qualities  of  seventeenth-cen- 
tury verse. 

Underneath  this  sable  herse 
Lies  the  subject  of  all  verse: 
Sidney's  sister,  Pembroke's  mother: 
Death,  ere  thou  hast  slain  another 
Fair  and  learn'd  and  good  as  she, 
Time  shall  throw  a  dart  at  thee. 

And  Wither  is  best  known  for  the  Cavalier  gayety  of  the 
song: 

Shall  I,  wasting  in  despair, 
Die  because  a  woman's  fair? 

A  third  group  of  poets  may  be  called  the  school  of 
Jonson,  partly  because  they  reflect  his  quality  of  careful 
workmanship,  but  still  more  because  they  school 

were  of  his  personal  following,  "sealed  of  the       Of  Jonson. 
tribe  of  Ben,"  and  like  him  devoted  to  this 
world  and  its  pleasures.     The  chief  of  them  was  Robert 
Herrick,  who  made  of  Jonson  his  patron  saint  and  adopted 
his  creed  to  live  merrily  and  write  good  verses. 


172  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

Robert  Herrick  (1591-1674)  was  apprenticed  in  boy- 
hood to  his  uncle,  a  goldsmith  in  Cheapside.     After  some 
time  spent  at  Cambridge  he  returned  to  Lon- 

don'  in  nis  thirtieth  year'  and  lived  on  his 
wits  in  the  literary  bohemia  of  the  Inns  of 
Court.  In  1629,  having  taken  orders,  he  was  presented 
by  King  Charles  to  the  vicarage  of  Dean  Prior,  in  Devon- 
shire. Here,  with  no  duties  to  perform  save  the  reading 
of  a  weekly  sermon  to  a  handful  of  sleepy  parishioners, 
he  had  ample  opportunity,  during  the  next  nineteen  years, 
to  develop  his  peculiar  lyrical  gift.  His  genius  was  of 
the  kind  which  carves  cherry-stones,  not  of  the  kind 
which  hews  great  figures  from  the  living  rock.  Left  per- 
fectly to  himself,  amid  the  flowers  of  his  vicarage  garden, 
with  the  pretty  traditional  ceremonies  and  merrymakings 
of  country  life  to  look  at,  he  spent  his  days  carving 
cherry-stones,  indeed,  but  giving  to  them  the  delicate 
finish  of  cameos  or  of  goldsmith's  work.  In  poem  after 
poem  he  enters  with  extraordinary  zest  and  folk-feeling 
into  the  small  joys  and  pageants  of  rural  life — a  bridal 
procession,  a  cudgel-play  between  two  clowns  on  the 
green,  a  puppet-show  at  the  fair,  the  hanging  of  holly  and 
box  at  Candlemas  eve.  Perhaps  the  most  exquisite  of 
all  is  "  Corinna  Going  a-Maying."  This  little  masterpiece 
is  drenched  with  the  pungent  dews  of  a  spring  morning. 
As  the  poet  calls  his  "sweet  slug-a-bed"  out-of-doors, 
and  leads  her  through  the  village  streets,  already  decked 
with  whitethorn,  toward  the  fields  and  woods  where  the 
May-day  festivities  are  to  be  enacted,  we  feel  that  the 
poetry  of  old  English  life  speaks  through  one  who  has 
experienced  to  the  full  its  simple  charm.  Even  the  note 
of  sadness  at  the  end,  the  looking  forward  to  that  dark 
time  when  Corinna  herself  and  all  her  village  mates  shall 
''lie  drowned  in  endless  night,"  has  a  peasant-like  sincer- 
ity of  feeling. 

When  the  parliamentary  forces  had  gained  the  battle 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  173 

which  they  had  been  waging  with  the  King's  men,  and 
Herrick  as  a  loyalist  was  ejected  from  his  living,  he 
went  back  to  London.  The  year  of  his  re- 
turn (1648)  he  published  his  poems  under  the  Hemck's 
title  of  Hesperides  and  Noble  Numbers,  the  lat- 
ter  half  of  the  title  referring  to  the  religious 
poems  of  the  collection.  There  could  be  no  more  striking 
sign  of  the  immense  religious  ferment  of  the  time  than 
these  poems,  emanating  as  they  do  from  an  epicurean 
and  pagan  nature,  whose  philosophy  of  life  is  summed 
up  in  his  most  famous  song:  ''Gather  ye  rosebuds  while 
ye  may."  In  the  wonderful  poem  called  "The  Litany," 
the  masterpiece  among  Herrick 's  religious  poems,  we  see 
how  upon  even  his  gay  and  sensuous  nature  there  de- 
scended at  times  that  dark  shadow  of  religious  terror 
which  later  found  its  final  and  appalling  expression  in  the 
Grace  Abounding  of  John  Bunyan.  In  Herrick's  case, 
however,  this  is  only  a  passing  phase  of  feeling.  He  is  to 
be  remembered  as  the  poet  of  "Corinna  Going  a-May- 
ing,"  the  "Night-Piece  to  Julia,"  and  of  a  myriad  other 
little  poems  in  which  he  chronicles  his  delight  in  nature, 
and  in  the  exquisite  surface  of  life  as  he  saw  it. 

The  attempt,  which  is  notable  in  Herrick,  to  escape 
from  the  seriousness  of  the  age  was  characteristic  of  the 
court  of  Charles  I  and  of  the  three  poets, 
Carew,    Lovelace,    and    Suckling,    who    are    ™eetsCava 
known  as  the  Cavalier  poets.     Of  the  three, 
Thomas  Carew  (1598-1638?)  was  the  most  sincere.     His 
work  is  occasionally  tinged  with  licentiousness;  but  much 
of  it,  on  the  other  hand,  has  genuine  beauty  and  dignity. 
He  felt  the  influence  of  both  Ben  Jonson  and  Donne,  and 
such  a  poem  as  "To  His  Mistress  in  Absence"  has  the 
sanity  and  finish  of  the  one,  mingled  with  the  magnetic 
eloquence  of  the  other.     He  is  best  known  by  his  lighter 
efforts,  such  as  his  "Give  me  more  love  or  more  disdain," 
in  which  poem  his  felicity  and  courtly  address  display 


174  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

themselves  at  their  height.  He  wrote  also  a  striking 
court  masque  entitled  Cesium  Brittanicum,  which  was 
produced  in  1634,  with  the  greatest  magnificence,  as  a 
kind  of  counter-demonstration  to  a  recent  Puritan  on- 
slaught upon  the  theatre.  Carew  died  in  1638,  just  be- 
fore the  bursting  of  the  storm  which  was  to  scatter  the 
gay  society  of  Whitehall,  and  bring  to  poverty,  exile,  and 
death  the  men  and  women  who  had  danced  the  measures 
in  his  joyous  masque. 

John    Suckling    (1609-1641)    and    Richard    Lovelace 
(1618-1658)  were  young  courtiers  of  wealth  and  great 

social  brilliance,  who  practised  poetry  much 
LovdaS'"1'1  as  t^ie>r  practised  swordsmanship ;  facility  in 

turning  a  sonnet  or  a  song  being  still,  as  in 
the  Elizabethan  age,  considered  a  part  of  a  courtier's 
education.  Each  of  them  wrote,  it  would  seem  almost 
by  happy  accident,  two  or  three  little  songs  which  are 
the  perfection  of  melody,  grace,  and  aristocratic  ease. 
Suckling's  tone  is  cynical  and  mocking;  the  best  songs  of 
Lovelace,  on  the  other  hand,  "To  Lucasta  on  Going  to 
the  Wars"  and  "To  Althea  from  Prison,"  breathe  a 
spirit  of  old-fashioned  chivalry,  of  faithfulness  to  the 
ideals  of  love  and  knightly  honor.  Both  Suckling  and 
Lovelace  met  with  tragic  reversal  of  fortune;  and  the 
contrast  between  their  careless,  brilliant  youth  and  their 
later  days  has  thrown  about  their  names  a  romantic 
glamour  which  has  had  perhaps  as  much  to  do  with  pre- 
serving their  fame  as  the  tiny  sheaf  of  lyrics  they  left 
behind. 

Abraham  Cowley  (1618-1667)  has  been  regarded  as, 
next  to  Donne,  the  chief  offender  among  the  metaphysical 

school,  but  he  seems  to  have  preferred  the 

Abraham  •,       •,       ,  .  __ 

Cowiey.  leadership  of  Jonson,  while  his  long  religious 

epic  might   seem    to   connect   him   remotely 

with  the  followers  of  Spenser.     Cowley  was  famous  as 

a  poet  at  fifteen,  at  thirty  his  name  was  one  to  con- 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  175 

jure  with,  and  in  his  later  years  he  was  accepted  by  his 
contemporaries  as  the  crown  and  acme  of  the  poets 
of  all  time.  His  reputation  decayed  rapidly  after  his 
death,  and  he  is  now  a  somewhat'  "frustrate  ghost" 
in  the  corridors  of  fame.  He  has  all  the  vicious  manner- 
isms of  the  school  of  Donne,  with  little  thought  or  pas- 
sion to  redeem  them.  His  greatest  effort,  The  Mistress, 
a  series  of  love-poems,  might,  in  Doctor  Johnson's  ener- 
getic words,  "have  been  written  for  hire  by  a  philosophi- 
cal rhymer  who  had  only  heard  of  another  sex";  and  his 
once-famous  Davideis,  a  heroic  poem  of  the  troubles  of 
King  David  of  Israel,  is  now  hopelessly  dead.  From  any 
sweeping  condemnation  of  Cowley,  however,  must  be  ex- 
cepted  his  earnest  and  simple  lines  "On  the  Death  of 
Mr.  William  Hervey,"  his  beautiful  Elegy  on  Crashaw, 
and  a  few  of  his  Pindarique  Odes,  which  last  have  at  times 
a  full  and  sonorous  music.  The  loose  ode  form,  adapted 
by  Cowley  from  the  Greek  of  Pindar,  was  used  all  the 
way  down  through  the  age  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  and  was 
almost  the  only  relief  which  the  classic  age  allowed  itself 
from  the  monotonous  beat  of  the  heroic  couplet.  Cow- 
ley,  as  secretary  to  Queen  Henrietta  Maria  in  her  exile, 
was  associated  with  the  men  who  carried  to  victory  the 
banner  of  classicism  and  prepared  the  way  for  Dryden. 
In  his  own  work  he  hung  dubiously  between  the  romantic 
and  the  classic  schools;  the  romantic  impulse  in  him  was 
weak,  and  the  classical  instinct  not  spontaneous. 

Cowley  wrote  also  a  group  of  essays  which  reflect  the 
self-study  of  the  time.  He  thus  bridges  the  gap  between 
the  impersonal  observation  of  Bacon  and  the  genial, 
friendly  tone  of  Steele  and  Addison.  His  last  essay,  "Of 
Myself,"  might  have  served  as  a  model  for  the  first  essay 
in  the  Spectator. 

Another  poet  who  is  eclectic  in  his  tendency  is  Andrew 
Marvel!  (1621-1678).  Marvell  was  among  the  first  of 
English  poets  to  feel  the  charm  of  nature  with  romantic 


'176  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

intensity,  and  at  the  same  time  with  matter-of-fact  real- 
ism.    The  bulk  of  his  nature-poetry  was  written  between 
his  twenty-ninth   and  his  thirty-first  years, 

M^rveTl  wllile    n6    WaS    ^V^    in    country   Seclusion    at 

Nunappleton,  as  tutor  to  the  young  daughter 
of  Lord  Fairfax,  commander-in-chief  of  the  parliamentary 
forces.  The  principal  record  of  these  two  years  of  poetic 
life  is  a  long  poem  entitled  "Appleton  House";  besides 
this,  the  most  beautiful  of  his  country  poems  are  perhaps 
"The  Garden"  and  "The  Mower  to  the  Glow-worms." 
In  these,  and  in  his  delicate  little  pastoral  dialogues,  he 
links  himself  with  the  pastoral  school  of  Spenser;  in  other 
places,  especially  in  the  lines  "To  a  Coy  Mistress,"  he 
shows  the  influence  of  Donne.  In  his  later  life  Marvell 
served  for  a  time  as  assistant  to  Milton,  then  acting  as 
Latin  secretary  to  Cromwell's  government.  He  helped 
Milton  in  his  blindness,  aided  him  to  escape  from  his  pur- 
suers at  the  Restoration,  and  watched  with  mingled  ad- 
miration and  awe  the  progress  of  Paradise  Lost,  which 
began  about  1658  to  take  shape,  after  twenty  years'  de- 
lay. In  the  noble  "Ode  to  Cromwell,"  Marvell  set  an 
example,  worthy  of  Milton  himself,  of  simple  dignity  and 
classical  restraint  in  the  treatment  of  a  political  theme. 
And  it  is  to  Marvell  that  we  owe  the  description  of  his 
opponent,  Charles  I,  on  the  scaffold,  in  lines  which,  more 
than  anything  ever  written,  make  him  unforgettably  the 
royal  martyr: 

He  nothing  common  did  or  mean 
Upon  that  memorable  scene. 

The  characteristic  prose  of  the  seventeenth  century  is 
nearer  the  romantic  eccentricity  and  extreme 
Centoyentb"    individuality  of  the  poetry  of  Donne  and  his 
Prose.  school  than  to  the  classic  precision  of  Jon- 

son.  It  is  extremely  loose  in  structure,  over- 
colored,  elaborate,  wayward.  In  subject-matter  the  prose 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  177 

represents  the  self-consciousness  and  personal  interest  of 
the  time.  It  was  a  period  of  autobiography,  personal 
essay,  biography,  and  history. 

At  the  very  outset  we  are  confronted  by  the  splendid 
figure  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  a  prisoner  in  the  tower 
after  the  failure  of  his  daring  plans  in 
America,  launching  himself  on  an  enterprise 
equally  characteristic  of  the  confident  spirit 
of  the  Renaissance — The  History  of  the  World.  Raleigh 
worked  on  this  mighty  task  for  years,  with  the  assistance 
of  Ben  Jonson  and  others,  and  left  six  massive  volumes 
completed.  It  is  interesting  to-day  only  because  of  the 
light  which  it  throws  on  the  conception  of  history  in  that 
time,  and  as  a  monument  of  English  prose,  much  of  it 
wearisomely  pedantic  and  irritatingly  loose  and  ineffi- 
cient, but  rising  at  times  into  sombre  eloquence,  as  in  its 
concluding  sentence: 

O  eloquent,  just,  and  mighty  Death !  Whom  none  could  advise, 
thou  hast  persuaded;  what  none  hath  dared,  thou  hast  done;  and 
whom  all  the  world  hath  flattered,  thou  only  hast  cast  out  of  the 
world  and  despised;  thou  hast  drawn  together  all  the  far-stretched 
greatness,  all  the  pride,  cruelty,  and  ambition  of  man,  and  covered 
it  all  over  with  these  two  narrow  words,  Hie  jacet! 

Raleigh  was,  of  course,  a  great  Elizabethan.  One  of 
the  contrasts  between  that  age  and  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury is  furnished  by  the  fact  that  the  typical  historian  of 
the  latter  period,  Lord  Clarendon,  wrote  a  History  of  the 
Rebellion,  of  the  events  which  he  had  lived  through  and 
the  men  whom  he  knew. 

As  Donne  is  the  poet  who  belongs  most  essentially  to 
the  age,  so  of  prose  writers  is  Sir  Thomas  Browne  (1605- 
1682).      In     him     the     seventeenth-century 
"time-spirit"  found  curious  but  very  noble 
expression.     His  mind  was  deeply  tinged  with 
melancholy,  and  he  shared  the  prevalent  tendency  toward 


'178  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

religious  mysticism.  But  these  qualities  are  oddly  in- 
fused with  scepticism  flowing  from  his  scientific  studies, 
a  kind  of  dreamy,  half-credulous  scepticism,  very  differ- 
ent from  Bacon's  clear-cut  rational  view  of  things,  but 
more  characteristic  of  an  age  in  which  mediaeval  and 
modern  ways  of  thought  were  still  closely  mingled  to- 
gether. After  studying  medicine  at  the  famous  schools 
of  Montpellier  in  France  and  Padua  in  Italy,  Browne  set- 
tled as  a  physician  at  Norwich,  in  Norfolk,  and  there 
passed  his  life.  In  1642  appeared  his  first  work,  Religio 
Medici,  a  confession  of  his  own  personal  religious  creed. 
It  is  in  essence  a  mystical  acceptance  of  Christianity. 
"Methinks,"  he  says,  "there  be  not  impossibilities  enough 
in  religion  for  an  active  faith  ...  I  love  to  lose  myself 
in  a  mystery;  to  pursue  my  reason  to  an  O  Altitude!" 
This  sense  of  solemn  exaltation,  this  losing 
Characteristic  °*  nimself  ln  a  mystery  and  an  O  Altitudo,  is 
Mood.  Browne's  most  characteristic  mood.  He  loves 

to  stand  before  the  face  of  the  Eternal  and  the 
Infinite  until  the  shows  of  life  fade  away,  and  he  is  filled 
with  a  passionate  quietude  and  humility.  We  see  in  him 
how  far  the  temper  of  men  had  departed  from  the  Eliza- 
bethan zest  of  life,  from  the  Renaissance  delight  in  the 
stir  and  bustle  of  human  activity.  "Methinks,"  he  says, 
"I  begin  to  be  weary  of  the  sun.  .  .  .  The  world  to  me 
is  but  a  dream  and  mock-show,  and  we  all  therein  but 
pantaloons  and  antics,  to  my  severer  contemplations." 

While  the  mighty  struggle  which  Lord  Clarendon  de- 
picts in  his  History  of  the  Rebellion  was  shaking  the  earth 
Th  «TT  witn  its  "drums  an<3  tramplings,"  Sir  Thomas 

1116  Urn  -ry  . 

Burial."  Browne  was  quietly  writing  his  longest  work, 

Vulgar  Errors  (1646),  an  inquiry,  half-scien- 
tific and  half-credulous,  into  various  popular  beliefs  and 
superstitions.  Twelve  years  later  he  published  the  Urn 
Burial,  a  short  piece  suggested  by  the  finding  of  some 
ancient  Roman  funeral-urns  buried  in  the  earth  in  the 
neighborhood  of  Norwich.  The  Urn  Burial  is  ostensibly 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  179 

an  inquiry  into  the  various  historic  methods  of  disposing 
of  the  dead,  but  by  implication  it  is  a  descant  upon  the 
vanity  of  earthly  ambition,  especially  in  its  attempt  to 
hand  on  mortal  memory  to  future  ages.  It  is  Browne's 
most  characteristic  work,  and  contains  perhaps  the  su- 
preme examples  of  his  style. 

The  grandeur  and  solemnity  of  this  style,  at  its  best, 
is  hardly  to  be  paralleled  in  English  prose.  Like  almost 
all  the  writers  of  his  age,  Browne  is  extremely 
desultory  and  uneven;  his  "purple  patches" 
come  unexpectedly,  but  these  occasional  pas- 
sages have  a  pomp  and  majesty  which  even  Milton  has 
not  surpassed.  His  English  is  full  of  magniloquent  words 
and  phrases  coined  from  the  Latin,  and  the  music  of  his 
periods  is  deep,  stately,  and  long-drawn,  like  that  of  a 
heroic  funeral  march  or  the  full-stop  of  a  cathedral  organ. 
The  opening  of  the  last  section  of  the  Urn  Burial  will 
serve  perhaps  to  make  these  comparisons  clear:  "Now, 
since  these  dead  bones  have  already  outlasted  the  living 
ones  of  Methuselah,  and  in  a  yard  under  ground,  and 
thin  walls  of  clay,  outworn  all  the  strong  and  specious 
buildings  above  it;  and  quietly  rested  under  the  drums 
and  tramplings  of  three  conquests:  what  prince  can  prom- 
ise such  diuturnity  unto  his  reliques?"  The  way  in 
which  his  imagination  plays  through  his  thought  and 
flashes  a  sudden  illumination  of  beauty  over  his  pages 
may  be  suggested  by  these  words,  written  one  night  when 
he  had  sat  late  at  his  desk:  "To  keep  our  eyes  open  longer 
were  but  to  act  our  Antipodes.  The  huntsmen  are  up 
in  America!" 

A  wide-spread  national  mood  usually  finds  its  analyst. 
The  melancholy  of  the  seventeenth  century,  its  causes, 
its  manifestations,  and  its  cure,  were  exhaus-    Burton  and 
tively    treated    by    Richard    Burton    (1577-   the"Anat- 
1641)  in  his  Anatomy  of  Melancholy  (1621),  a   5fey^fcholy>,, 
book  into  which  he  gathered  the  out-of-the- 
way  learning  and  the  dreamy  speculation  of  fifty  years  of 


l8o  A   HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

recluse  life  at  Brasenose  College,  Oxford.  So  curious  a 
mixture  of  pedantry,  imagination,  and  quiet,  brooding 
humor,  covering  in  a  sense  the  whole  life  and  thought  of 
man,  could  hardly  have  been  produced  in  any  other  era 
of  English  literature;  as,  indeed,  no  other  era  would  have 
suggested  " melancholy"  as  a  theme  for  encyclopaedic 
treatment. 

Burton's  Anatomy  may  be  described   as   a   personal 
essay,  the  reflection  of  a  single  interest  in  a  curiously  self- 
centred,  shut-in  personality.     A  work  of  the 
Walton  same  nature,  but  utterly  different  in  tone  and 

spirit,  is  Walton's  Complete  Angler  (1653). 
Izaak  Walton  was  a  London  linen-draper,  who  spent  his 
working  days  in  measuring  cloth  and  serving  his  custo- 
mers over  the  shop  counter;  but  who  passed  his  holidays 
in  quite  another  fashion,  roaming  with  fishing-rod  and 
basket  along  the  banks  of  streams,  and  gazing  with  un- 
spoiled eyes  at  the  unspoiled  peace  and  gayety  of  nature. 
His  book  is  a  delightful  medley  of  personal  reminiscence 
and  sportsman's  dissertation  on  the  haunts  and  habits 
of  fishes  and  ways  of  taking  them. 

Walton  contributed  to  the  interest  of  the  time  in 
human  life  by  writing  his  Lives  of  Donne,  Herbert, 
Hooker,  and  others — the  most  charming 
pieces  of  contemporary  portraiture  which 
biography.  have  come  down  to  us.  This  interest  mani- 
fested itself  in  a  wide  range,  from  generalized" 
sketches  of  types,  called  Characters,  which  were  written 
in  great  numbers  by  Sir  Thomas  Overbury  and  others, 
to  minute  autobiographical  studies.  Of  these  we  have 
two  which  are  of  extreme  interest.  Lord  Herbert  of 
Cherbury,  elder  brother  of  the  poet,  has  recorded  in  his 
Autobiography  the  life  experience  of  a  Cavalier— and  John 
Bunyan  in  his  Grace  Abounding  (see  p.  194)  that  of  a 
Puritan. 

The  interest  in  conduct  and  etiquette,  which  we  saw 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  l8l 

manifesting  itself  so  strongly  in  Elizabethan  England, 
continued,  but  takes  in  part  a  new  form   responsive   to 
the  deeper  religious  tone  of  the  time.     Jeremy 
Taylor  (1613-1667),  who  was  a  great  preacher, 
a  great  controversialist  on  the  Anglican  side, 
and  a  master  of  sacred  rhetoric,  wrote  two  manuals," 
Holy  Living  and  Holy  Dying  (1650-1651),  of  which  Hazlitt 
says:  "It  is  a  divine  pastoral.     He  writes  to  the  faithful 
followers  of  Christ  as  the  shepherd  pipes  to  his  flock.  .  .  . 
He  makes  life  a  procession  to  the  grave,  but  crowns  it 
with  garlands,  and  rains  sacrificial  roses  on  its  path." 

Thomas  Fuller  (1608-1661),  who  was  also  a  royalist 
clergyman,  in  his  Holy  State  and  Profane  State   (1642) 
used  the  generalized  character  sketch  to  de- 
fine virtue  and  vice  in  various  walks  of  life,  Fuller*8 
and  then  drew  concrete  examples  from  biog- 
raphy.    His  Worthies  of  England  (1662)  is  a  sort  of  bio- 
graphical dictionary  arranged  by  counties.     Such  works 
as  these  have  survived,  not  only  because  of  their  intrinsic 
value,  but  because  of  the  charm  of  their  style,  which  re- 
flects the  quaint  or  brilliant  personalities  of  their  authors. 

II 

John  Milton,  after  Shakespeare  the  greatest  of  English 
poets,  was  born  December  9,  1608,  in  Bread  Street,  Lon- 
don. His  father  was  a  scrivener  (notary  pub-  Milton,s 
lie),  who  had  embraced  the  Puritan  faith,  but  Early  Life> 
whose  Puritanism  was  not  of  the  hard  and 
forbidding  type.  The  boy  grew  up  in  a  home  where 
music,  literature,  and  the  social  graces  gave  warmth  and 
color  to  an  atmosphere  of  serene  piety.  During  his  boy- 
hood England  was  still  Elizabethan;  among  the  great 
body  of  Puritans,  geniality  and  zest  of  life  had  not  yet 
given  place  to  that  harsh  strenuousness  which  Puritanism 
afterward  took  on.  Milton  was  taught  music,  and  was 


l82        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

allowed  to  range  at  will  through  the  English  poets;  among 
these  Spenser,  the  poet  of  pure  beauty,  exercised  over 
him  a  charm  which  was  to  leave  its  traces  upon  all  the 
work  of  his  early  manhood.  At  Christ's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, whither  he  proceeded  in  his  sixteenth  year,  he 
began  to  prepare  himself  with  earnestness  and  consecra- 
tion for  the  life  of  poetry.  He  had  already  determined 
to  be  a  poet,  and  that,  too,  in  no  ordinary  sense.  His 
mind  was  fixed  on  lofty  themes,  and  he  believed  that  such 
themes  could  be  fitly  treated  only  by  one  who  had  led  a 
lofty  and  austere  life.  The  magnificent  ode  "On  the 
Morning  of  Christ's  Nativity,"  which  deals  with  the 
signs  and  portents  filling  the  world  at  the  Saviour's  birth, 
was  written  at  twenty-one.  It  showed  clearly,  or  might 
have  shown  to  any  one  who  had  eyes  to  see,  that  another 
mighty  poet  had  been  given  to  England. 

Two  years  later  Milton  left  Cambridge  and  went  to 
Horton,  a  little  village  west  of  London,  whither  his  father 
At  Horton  ^ac^  retired  to  spend  his  declining  days. 
Here,  in  a  beautiful  country  of  woods,  mead- 
ows, and  brimming  streams,  the  young  poet  spent  five 
quiet  years.  To  the  outward  view  he  was  all  but  idle, 
merely  "turning  over  the  Greek  and^Latin  classics"  in  a 
long  holiday.  Really  he  was  hard  'at  work,  preparing 
himself  by  meditation,  by  communion  with  nature  and, 
with  the  lofty  spirits  of  the  past,  for  some  achievement 
in  poetry  which  (to  use  his  own  words)  England  "would 
not  willingly  let  die."  Meanwhile  he  was  writing  very 
little,  but  that  little  perfect,  thrice  distilled.  A  sonnet 
sent  to  his  friend  on  his  twenty-third  birthday  shows 
that  he  was  deeply  dissatisfied  with  what  he  had  done 
in  verse  before  going  to  Horton;  and  indeed,  if  we  except 
the  Nativity  Hymn,  he  had  reason  to  be  dissatisfied. 
The  other  poems  of  his  college  period  are  disfigured  by 
the  vices  of  conceitfulness,  exaggeration,  and  tasteless 
ingenuity,  peculiar  to  the  seventeenth  century.  The 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  183 

Hymn  itself  is  marred  by  the  same  faults,  and  even  its 
beauties  are  some  of  them  plainly  imitative.  But  at 
Horton  Milton's  taste  gradually  became  surer,  his  touch 
upon  the  keys  of  his  instrument  superlatively  firm  and 
delicate.  He  went  back  to  purer  models,  and  learned 
now  to  borrow  without  imitating.  The  result  was  three 
long  poems  and  several  short  ones,  absolutely  flawless  in 
workmanship,  full  of  romantic  beauty  curbed  and  chast- 
ened by  a  classical  sense  of  proportion  and  fitness.  It  is 
in  these  poems  that  we  first  see  clearly  what  Milton 
stands  for  in  the  poetic  art  of  the  century.  He  is  a  child 
of  the  Renaissance,  the  last  of  that  great  romantic  line 
of  which  Spenser,  Sidney,  Marlowe,  Shakespeare,  Donne, 
and  Fletcher  are  scions;  but  he  has  drunk  deeper  than 
the  others  of  the  springs  of  antique  art;  there  is  in  him  a 
more  austere  artistic  instinct,  linked  somehow  with  his 
austerer  moral  nature.  The  spirit  of  his  art  is  romantic; 
its  expression  is,  in  the  widest  sense,  classic. 

The  first  product  of  Milton's  Horton  period,  the  poem 
in  two  parts,  "L'Allegro"  (the  joyous  man)  and  "II  Pen- 
seroso"  (the  meditative  man),  is  in  its  nature 
autobiographical.  The  two  parts  of  the  poem  ^^gro" 
paint  the  two  sides  of  Milton's  own  tempera-  penseroso." 
ment:  the  one  urging  outward,  toward  com- 
munion with  the  brightness  and  vivid  activity  of  life; 
the  other  drawing  inward,  toward  lonely  contemplation, 
or  musings  upon  the  dreamier,  quieter  aspects  of  nature 
and  of  human  existence.  To  represent  these  two  moods 
he  imagines  two  typical  youths,  living  each  through  a 
day  of  typical  thoughts  and  pursuits,  in  the  midst  of  sur- 
roundings harmonious  with  his  special  tastes.  Taken  to- 
gether the  two  little  poems  give  a  view  of  the  life  which 
Milton  led  during  the  five  happy  years  of  his  preparation 
for  the  poetic  ministry,  wonderfully  compressed,  clarified, 
and  fixed  in  permanent  symbols. 

The  next  two  poems  of  this  period  were  in  masque  form; 


I&4  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

one  a  fragment,  Arcades,  the  other  a  complete  masque, 
taking  its  title  from  the  chief  character,  "Comus,"  god  of 
revelry.  Comus  was  written  at  the  request 
of  Milton's  friend,  Henry  Lawes,  a  musician, 
who  supplied  the  music,  and  played  the  part  of  the  At- 
tendant Spirit  when  the  masque  was  presented  (1634)  in 
the  castle  of  Ludlow,  on  the  Welsh  border.  The  "plot" 
of  Comus  is  simple  and  very  effective,  affording  just  a 
touch  of  the  fantastic  mythological  element  needed  for 
scenic  display,  yet  leaving  the  main  interest  of  the  piece 
to  centre  upon  the  rich,  serious  poetry  which  Milton  puts 
into  the  mouths  of  his  few  characters.  Two  brothers  and 
a  sister,  astray  by  night  in  the  forest,  become  separated; 
the  girl  is  taken  captive  by  Comus,  and  is  led  to  the  place 
where  he  dwells,  surrounded  by  strange  half-bestial  crea- 
tures whom  he  has  transformed.  He  attempts  to  work 
upon  her  the  same  transformation.  She  resists  him,  re- 
fusing to  yield  to  the  allurements  of  sense,  and  is  at 
length  rescued  by  her  brothers  and  an  "attendant  spirit," 
who  takes  the  guise  of  their  father's  shepherd.  It  was 
characteristic  of  Milton  that  he  should  have  put  a  serious 
moral  lesson  into  a  form  of  spectacular  and  lyric  enter- 
tainment usually  of  the  most  frivolous  kind.  Fortu- 
nately, his  power  as  an  artist  was  so  developed  that  he 
could  charge  the  delicate  texture  of  his  masque  with 
ethical  doctrine,  without  at  all  marring  its  airy  beauty. 
When  Comus  was  written,  the  Puritans  and  the  court 
party  were  already  drifting  toward  open  conflict.  The 
Deepening  influences  of  the  Renaissance,  for  which  the 
Seriousness  court  party  largely  stood,  were  losing  force; 
wo?k!t0n'S  and  tne  moral  enthusiasms  flowing  from  the 
Reformation  were  meanwhile  growing  nar- 
rower and  intenser,  in  that  other  element  of  the  nation, 
the  Puritan  party,  where  they  had  taken  deepest  hold. 
An  atmosphere  of  moral  strenuousness,  soon  to  deepen 
into  sternness,  and  then  into  hard  fanaticism,  had  begun 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  185 

to  spread  over  England,  affecting  in  one  way  or  another 
the  vital  spirits  of  all  men.  In  Comus  this  moral  strenu- 
ousness  finds  expression,  though  in  the  most  unobtrusive 
manner.  In  the  last  poem  of  Milton's  Horton  period, 
"Lycidas,"  written  in  1637,  there  is  sounded  a  sterner 
note,  a  note  of  austere  indignation  and  fierce  warning 
against  the  corruptions  which  had  crept  into  the  church, 
"Lycidas"  is  ap  elegy  upon  the  death  of  Edward  Kingr 
a  college-mate  of  Milton's,  drowned  in  the  Irish  Sea- 
King  had  been;  in  his  way,  a  poet;  and  it  was 
a  fixed  convention,  among  the  poets  of  the 
pastoral  school,  to  represent  themselves  and  their  art 
under  the  guise  of  the  shepherd  life.  When  Milton, 
therefore,  represents  himself  and  his  dead  friend  as  shep- 
herds driving  their  flocks,  and  piping  for  fauns  and  satyrs 
to  dance;  when  he  calls  the  sea- nymphs  and  the  gods  of 
the  wind  to  task  for  the  disaster  of  his  fellow-shepherd's 
death — he  merely  makes  use  of  a  form  of  thought  be- 
queathed to  him  through  Spenser,  Fletcher,  and  Browne, 
from  a  long  succession  of  earlier  poets.  But  he  does  not 
rest  content  with  this ;  he  adds  to  it  another  kind  of  sym- 
bolism, not  pagan  but  Christian.  King,  besides  being  a 
poet,  had  been  a  preacher,  or  at  least  had  been  in  prepara- 
tion for  the  ministry.  He  was  therefore  not  only  a  shep- 
herd under  Apollo,  but  a  shepherd  under  Christ;  a  keeper 
of  the  souls  of  men  which  are  the  flocks  of  the  Good 
Shepherd.  This  second  symbolism  Milton  boldly  iden- 
tifies with  the  first,  for  to  him  the  poet  and  the  preacher 
were  one  in  spiritual  aim.  Still  more  boldly,  in  the 
strange  procession  of  classic  and  pseudoclassic  divinities 
whom  he  summons  to  mourn  over  Lycidas,  he  includes 
Saint  Peter,  the  bearer  of  the  keys  of  the  church;  and  he 
puts  in  his  mouth  words  of  solemn  wrath  against  those 
"blind  mouths,"  those  worldly  churchmen  jjho, 

for  their  bellies'  sake 
Creep,  and  intrude,  and  climb  into  the  fold; 


1 86  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

closing  with  a  shadowy  menace  of  the  punishment  which 
is  soon  to  overtake  the  ecclesiastical  corruption  of  the 
age.  "Lycidas"  gathers  up  all  the  iridescent  color  and 
varied  music  of  Milton's  youthful  verse,  indeed,  of  the 
whole  Spenserian  school;  and  at  the  same  time,  by  virtue 
of  the  moral  passion  which  burns  in  it,  it  looks  forward 
to  the  period  of  public  combat  into  which  the  poet  was 
about  to  plunge. 

i     The  twenty  years  of  Milton's  life  as  a  public  disputanl 

we  must  pass  over  hurriedly.     They  were  preceded  by  a 

period  of  travel  abroad  (1638-1639),  chiefly 

Public  Life:      in  Italy,  during  which  he  met  Galileo,  was 

His  Prose        entertained  by  the  Italian  literary  academies.. 

Writings.  . 

and  pondered  much  upon  a  projected  epic- 
poem  on  the  subject  of  King  Arthur's  wars,  a  subject 
suggested  to  him  by  the  epics  of  Tasso  and  Ariosto.  His 
return  was  hastened  by  news  of  King  Charles's  expeditioi^ 
against  the  Scots,  a  step  whose  seriousness  Milton  wel  i 
knew.  Once  back  in  London,  he  was  drawn  into  a  pam  • 
phlet  war  on  the  vexed  question  of  episcopacy.  Then 
followed  his  ill-starred  marriage,  and  the  writing  of  his 
pamphlets  on  divorce;  these  were  received  with  astonish 
ment  and  execration  by  his '  countrymen,  who  did  not: 
see  that  Milton  was  only  bringing  to  bear,  upon  one  issue 
of  domestic  life,  that  free  spirit  of  question  everywhere 
being  applied  to  public  institutions,  and  everywhere 
spreading  change  through  the  social  fabric  of  England. 
Another  signal  illustration  of  Milton's  revolutionary  ques- 
tioning followed,  in  the  shape  of  an  attack  upon  the  cen- 
sorship of  the  press.  The  time-honored  institution  of  the 
censorship  he  saw  to  be  an  intolerable  hindrance  to  free- 
dom of  thought;  in  a  pamphlet  entitled  Areopagitica 
(1644)  he  launched  against  it  all  the  thunders  and  light- 
nings of  his  magnificent  rhetoric.  On  the  execution  of  the 
King  (1649)  Milton  was  the  first  to  lift  up  his  voice,  ami.  I 
the  hush  and  awe  of  consternation,  in  defense  of  the  deed. 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  187 

His  pamphlet  On  the  Tenure  of  Kings  and  Magistrates  was 
of  such  timely  service  to  the  Commonwealth  party  that 
lie  was  offered  the  position  of  Latin  secretary  to  Crom- 
well's government,  his  duties  being  to  indite  correspon- 
dence with  foreign  powers,  and  to  reply  to  attacks  by 
foreign  pamphleteers  of  importance.  In  the  midst  of  a 
controversy  of  this  sort  his  eyes  failed,  and  in  a  short 
time  he  was  totally  blind.  He  continued  his  duties,  with 
Andrew  Marvell  as  his  assistant,  until  1658.  After  the 
Restoration  in  1660,  Milton  was  forced  to  go  into  hiding, 
nnd  he  barely  escaped  paying  with  his  life  for  his  fearless 
support  of  the  ideals  and  actions  of  the  Commonwealth 
party. 

Ever  since  his  college  days  Milton  had  been  looking 
forward  to  undertaking  some  work  of  poetry  large  enough 
to  give  scope  to  all  his  power.  By  1642  he 
had  virtually  decided  upon  the  subject  of  the 
f.  all  of  Adam,  though  he  at  first  intended  to 
treat  the  subject  in  the  form  of  a  drama.  During  the 
rixteen  years  between  1642  and  his  dismissal  from  the 
Latin  secretaryship  in  1658,  this  subject  was  seldom  long 
absent  from  his  mind.  In  the  midst  of  the  "noises  and 
hoarse  disputes"  into  which  he  had  thrown  himself  for 
patriotic  service,  the  only  poetic  production  which  he  al- 
lowed himself  was  a  small  group  of  sonnets,  written  at 
rare  intervals  and  dealing  for  the  most  part  with  passing 
events.  Except  for  these,  he  had  hidden  "that  one 
talent  which  is  death  to  hide,"  but  he  more  than  once 
turned  aside  in  his  pamphlets  to  throw  out  a  proud  hint 
concerning  the  work  laid  upon  him  by  the  "great  Task- 
master," of  adding  something  majestic  and  memorable  to 
the  treasury  of  English  verse.  Meanwhile  his  chosen  sub- 
ject lay  in  his  mind,  gradually  taking  form,  and  gathering 
to  itself  the  riches  of  long  study  and  reflection.  When  at 
last  his  duty  as  a  patriot  was  done,  he  turned  at  once  to 
liis  deferred  task-.  Forced  to  seek  shelter  from  the  storm 


1 88  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  the  royalist  reaction,  he  carried  with  him  into  his  hid- 
ing-place the  opening  book  of  Paradise  Lost,  begun  two 
years  earlier.  The  poem  was  finished  by  1665,  and  was 
published  by  an  obscure  printer  in  1667. 

The  central  theme  of  Paradise  Lost,  namely,  the  fall  of 
Adam  from  a  state  of  innocence  into  a  state  of  sin,  occu- 
pies a  relatively  small  space  in  the  whole 
The  vastness  scheme  of  the  poem.  The  action  begins1  in 
Scheme.  heaven,  before  man  is  created,  or  the  earth 
and  its  ministering  spheres  are  hung  out  in 
space.  The  rebellion  of  Lucifer  against  the  omnipotent 
ruler  of  heaven;  the  defeat  of  the  rebel  armies  and  their 
casting  down  into  the  dreary  cavern  of  hell,  which  has 
been  carved  out  of  chaos  to  be  their  prison-house;  the 
creation  of  the  terrestrial  universe  and  the  setting  of  man 
in  the  garden  of  Eden  to  take  the  place  of  the  apostate 
angels  in  God's  affection;  the  expedition  of  Lucifer  from 
hell  to  earth  for  the  purpose  of  beguiling  the  innocent 
pair;  the  going  and  coming  of  God's  messengers  and  sen- 
tinels— all  this  constitutes  a  vast  drama  of  which  the 
actual  temptation  and  fall  of  Adam  is  only  an  episode. 
With  the  exception  of  Dante  no  modern  mind  has  con- 
ceived an  action  so  immense,  or  s'et  a  world-drama  on  a 
stage  of  such  sublime  dimensions. 

In  spite  of  this  vastness  of  scheme,  however,  Milton's 
imagination  does  not  take  refuge  in  vagueness.  His 
The  imagery  is  everywhere  concrete,  in  places 

Concreteness  startlingly  vivid  and  tangible.  It  may  even 
^e  ur&ed  against  the  poem  that  some  things 
are  presented  with  an  exactness  of  delineation 
which  detracts  from  their  power  to  awe  the  mind;  but 
broadly  speaking,  the  poet's  ability  to  evoke  clear  and 

1  In  the  approved  epic  manner,  Milton  opens  his  poem  in  the  middle 
of  the  action,  after  the  rebellious  angels  have  been  cast  down  into  hell. 
The  earlier  events  are  given  in  retrospective  narrative  by  the  archangel 
Raphael  and  by  Adam. 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  189 

rememberable  pictures  of  more  than  titanic  size,  and  to 
make  his  cosmic  drama  as  clear  to  our  mental  vision  as 
are  the  natural  sights  of  earth,  gives  to  his  work  its  most 
enduring  claim  upon  our  interest.  Upon  the  theology 
of  the  poem  time  has  laid  its  finger;  a  part  of  it  thought- 
ful men  now  reject,  or  interpret  in  a  far  different  sense 
from  Milton's.  The  blind  Puritan  bard  hardly  succeeded, 
even  to  the  satisfaction  of  his  own  day,  in  his  avowed 
intention  to 

assert  Eternal  providence 
And  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men, 

for  his  religion  was  a  special  creed,  made  up  in  part  of 
perishable  dogmas.  But  by  the  imperishable  sublimity 
of  the  pictures  which  he  has  given  to  our  imaginations, 
he  has  asserted  Providence  in  another  sense,  and  justified 
God  in  the  glory  of  the  human  mind  He  created. 

The  word  "sublimity,"  so  often  abused,  has  in  the  case 
of  Milton's  later  work  real  fitness.     It  was  a  quality  to 
which  he  attained  only  after  years  of  stern 
experience;  it  was  the  reward  of  his  long  re-    "Sublimity" 
nunciation  of  his  art  in  the  interest  of  his 
country.     There   are   suggestions   of  it  in  his  youthful 
hymn  on  the  Nativity,  and  one  passage  of  "Lycidas"  at- 
tains it: 

Ay  me !  whilst  thee  the  shores  and  sounding  seas 
Wash  far  away,  where'er  thy  bones  are  hurled; 
Whether  beyond  the  stormy  Hebrides, 
Where  thou  perhaps  under  the  whelming  tide 
Visit'st  the  bottom  of  the  monstrous  world; 
Or  whether  thou,  to  our  moist  vows  denied, 
Sleep'st  by  the  fable  of  Bellerus  old, 
Where  the  great  Vision  of  the  guarded  mount 
Looks  toward  Namancos  and  Bayona's  hold. 

These  lines,  taken  in  their  proper  connection,  achieve 
that  synthesis  of  the  majestic  and  the  mysterious  which 


190  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

we  call  sublimity.  They  show  that  the  quality  was  na- 
tive to  Milton's  mind.  But  it  is  highly  probable  that 
without  those  years  of  stern  repression,  when  his  imagi- 
nation was  held  back  by  his  will,  gaining  momentum  like 
the  dammed-up  waters  of  a  stream,  he  would  never  have 
attained  that  peculiar  mightiness  of  imagery  and  phrase 
which  causes  Paradise  Lost  to  deserve,  as  does  perhaps 
no  other  work  of  literature,  the  epithet  sublime.  Of 
course,  this  sublimity  Milton  gained  only  at  the  expense 
of  some  qualities  of  his  youthful  work  which  we  would 
fain  have  had  him  keep.  Grace,  lightness,  airy  charm— 
these  had  gone  from  him  forever  when  he  took  up  his  art 
again  after  his  long  silence.  The  art  of  "L'Allegro"  and 
Comns,  responsive  and  sinuous  as  the  tracery  of  danc- 
ing figures  about  a  Greek  vase,  had  given  place  to  an  art 
as  massive  and  strenuous  as  the  frescoes  of  Michael 
Angelo,  depicting  the  solemn  scenes  of  the  creation  an-:l 
destruction  of  the  world. 

The  change  in  the  quality  of  thought  and  imagery  is, 
of  course,  accompanied  by  a  change  in  style.  Blank  vers* 
Milton  deliberately  chose  as  the  most  severe 
"Paradise  **  °^  English  measures;  having  chosen  it,  he  pro-- 
Lost™ '  ceeded  to  build  out  of  it  a  type  of  verse  be- 
fore unknown,  admirably  suited  to  the  gran- 
deur of  his  subject.  The  chief  peculiarity  of  this  Miltonio 
verse  is  the  length  and  involution  of  period.  The  sense 
is  held  suspended  through  many  lines,  while  clause  after 
clause  comes  in  to  enrich  the  meaning  or  to  magnify  the 
descriptive  effect;  then  the  period  closes,  and  this  sus- 
pended weight  of  meaning  falls  upon  the  mind  like  the 
combing  mass  of  a  breaker  on  the  shore.  A  second  and 
scarcely  less  important  characteristic  (though  hardly  so 
novel)  is  the  extreme  variety  of  pause;  the  sense  comes 
to  an  end,  and  the  suspended  thought  falls,  at  constantly 
varying  places  in  the  line,  a  device  by  which  blank  verst:, 
monotonous  when  otherwise  treated,  becomes  the  most 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  1 91 

diversified  of  rhythms.  In  these  and  other  ways  Milton 
made  for  himself  a  sublime  verse-instrument  to  match 
his  sublime  imagery  and  theme.  The  music  of  the  Hor- 
ton  poems,  compared  with  that  of  Paradise  Lost,  is  like 
the  melody  of  the  singing  voice  beside  the  manifold  har- 
monies of  an  orchestra,  or  the  rolling  chant  of  a  cathedral 
organ. 

In  1671,  four  years  after  the  publication  of  Paradise 
Lost,   appeared  Milton's   third   volume  of  verse.     (The 
college  and  Horton  poems  had  been  published 
in  1645.)     It  consisted  of  Paradise  Regained, 
a  supplement  to  Paradise  Lost;  and  of  Sam- 
ion  Agonistes,  a  drama  in  the  Greek  manner,  on  an  Old 
Testament  subject  which  Milton  had  thought  of  treating 
nearly  thirty  years  before.     Paradise  Regained  deals  with 
Christ's  temptation  by  Satan  in  the  Wilderness.     In  his 
first  epic  Milton  had  shown  how  mankind,  in  the  person 
of  Adam,  falls  before  the  wiles  of  the  Tempter,  and  be- 
comes an  outcast  from  divine  grace;  in  his  second  he 
shows  how  mankind,  in  the  person  of  Jesus,  wins  read- 
mission  to  divine  grace  by  withstanding  the  hellish  ad- 
versary.    By  general  consent  Paradise  Regained  is  given 
a  much  lower  place  than  Paradise  Lost,  in  spite  of  pas- 
sages  that   rise   to   an   impressive   height.     The   poet's 
weariness  is  manifest;  his  epic  vein  seems  exhausted, 
Samson  Agonistes,  however,   a  venture  in  a 
new  field  of  poetry,   shows  Milton's  genius      Agonistes." 
at  its  subtlest  and  maturest.     His  desire  was 
to  bring  over  into  English  the  gravity  and  calm  dignity 
of  the  Greek  tragedies;  and,  avoiding  the  lifeless  effect  of 
previous  experiments  of  the  sort,  to  give  to  his  grave  and 
calm  treatment  the  passion,  the  conviction,  the  kindling 
breath  without  which  poetry  cannot  exist.     Two  circum- 
stances made  this  not  only  easy,  but  almost  inevitable 
for  him.     In  the  first  place  his  character,  lofty  and  ardent 
to  begin  with,  had  now  under  misfortune  and  sacrifice 


IQ2  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

taken  on  just  that  serene  and  melancholy  gravity  peculiar 
to  the  great  tragic  poets  of  antiquity.  In  the  second 
place,  the  story  of  Samson  was,  in  a  sense,  his  own  story. 
Like  Samson  he  had  fought  against  the  Philistines  with 
the  strength  of  thirty  men;  he  had  taken  a  wife  from 
among  his  enemies  and  suffered  bitter  loss  at  her  hands; 
he  sat  now,  blind  and  dishonored,  amid  the  triumph  of 
the  Cavaliers,  as  Samson  among  the  holiday-making 
Philistines.  As  he  wrote,  his  own  personal  bitterness 
found  veiled  expression;  and  the  grand  choruses,  with 
their  dark  and  smothered  music,  pulsate  with  personal 
feeling. 

Milton  lived  for  three  years  after  the  publication  of  his 

last  poems.     Much  of  his  patrimony  had  disappeared  in 

the  readjustments  of  the  Restoration,  and  in 

Snrirs.  the  great  London  fire  of  l6665  but  he  was 
still  able  to  live  in  modest  comfort.  The 
painter  Richardson  gives  us  a  glimpse  of  the  poet  during 
his  last  years,  as  he  was  led  about  the  streets  clad  in  a 
gray  camblet  coat,  or  as  he  sat  in  a  gray  coarse  cloth  coat 
at  the  door  of  his  house,  near  Bunhill  Fields,  to  receive 
visitors.  "Lately,"  continues  Richardson,  "I  had  the 
good  fortune  to  have  another  picture  of  him  from  an 
aged  clergyman  in  Dorsetshire.  In  a  small  house  .  .  . 
up  one  pair  of  stairs,  which  was  hung  with  rusty  green, 
he  found  John  Milton,  sitting  in  an  elbow  chair;  black 
clothes,  and  neat  enough;  pale  but  not  cadaverous,  his 
hands  and  fingers  gouty  and  with  chalks  tones."  When 
we  compare  the  figure  thus  suggested  with  the  portrait 
painted  in  his  twenty-first  year,  we  realize  how  far  and 
under  what  public  and  private  stress,  Milton  had  travelled 
from  the  world  of  his  youth.  In  making  himself  over 
from  Elizabethan  to  Cromwellian  he  had  suffered  much 
and  renounced  much;  he  had  lost  many  of  those  genial 
human  qualities  which  have  won  for  less  worthy  natures 
a  warmth  of  love  denied  to  his  austerity.  But  if  we  deny 
him  love,  we  cannot  help  feeling  an  admiration  mixed 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  193 

with  awe,  for  the  loftiness  and  singleness  of  aim,  the 
purity  and  depth  of  moral  passion,  which  make  him  con- 
spicuous even  among  the  men  of  those  moving  times. 

The  deep  voice  of  Milton  rolled  on  its  interrupted  song 
more  than  a  decade  after  the  chorus  of  romantic  poetry 
had  been  hushed,  and  men  had  turned  away 
to  listen  to  the  new  "classical"  message  of 
Dryden  and  the  poets  of  precision.  In  like  manner  the 
fervid  and  imaginative  prose  of  the  first  half  of  the  cen- 
tury survives  into  the  Restoration  period  in  the  work  of 
John  Bunyan,  a  late  but  very  striking  exponent  of  the 
religious  revival  which  had  begun  more  than  a  century 
before  to  stir  the  conscience  of  Northern  Europe.  Bun- 
yan, the  rude  tinker  of  Elstow,  who  produced,  without 
learning  or  literary  example,  one  of  the  unique  master- 
pieces of  imaginative  English  prose,  can  only  be  under- 
stood by  reference  to  another  and  greater  literary  phe- 
nomenon of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  Authorized 
Version  of  the  Bible.  This  version  was  made 
by  order  of  James  I;  the  work  was  divided 
among  numerous  churchmen  of  his  appoint- 
ment, and  was  finished  in  1611.  The  translators  used 
not  only  the  original  Hebrew  and  Greek  texts  and  the 
Latin  Vulgate,  but  also  the  various  English  translations, 
from  WycKf  down.  They  succeeded  in  blending  together 
the  peculiar  excellences  of  all  these,  with  the  result  that 
we  possess  in  the  King  James  Bible  a  monument  of. 
English  prose  holding  of  no  particular  age,  but  gathering 
up  into  itself  the  strength  and  sweetness  of  all  ages.  % 

The  influence  of  this  mighty  book  upon  the  literature 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  although  great,  was  restricted 
by  two  circumstances.     In  the  first  place,  the 
Bible  was  early  monopolized  by  the  Puritan    a^^. 
party;  and  biblical  phraseology  and  imagery    Literature 
became  associated  with  an  ideal  of  life  which,     £ent^ry. 
at  least  in  the  grim  and  ascetic  form  it  as- 
sumed under  James  and  Charles,  was  distasteful  to  most 


194       A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  the  makers  of  literature.  In  the  second  place,  Latin 
was  still  held  in  superstitious  reverence  among  cultivated 
men;  and  writers  went  to  that  language  for  instruction, 
neglecting  the  ruder  but  more  vital  excellences  abounding 
in  the  prose  of  the  Bible.  Bunyan,  however, 
Hpon  was  at  once  a  Puritan  of  the  Puritans,  an  in- 

Bunyan. 

stinctive  artist,  and  an  unlearned  man,  to 
whom  Latin  was  only  a  name.  Hence  the  grandeur,  sim- 
plicity, and  force  of  biblical  prose,  acting  without  any 
interference  upon  his  passionately  earnest  imagination, 
made  him,  all  unknown  to  himself,  a  great  writer. 

John  Bunyan  (1628-1688)  was  born  in  the  village  of 
Elstow,  Bedfordshire.     His  father  was  a  tinker,  a  trade 

then  considered  little  above  vagabondage, 
struggles:  After  a  slight  schooling,  and  a  short  experience 
"Grace  of  soldiering  in  the  Civil  War  (on  which  side 

Abounding."  .  ; 

is  unknown),  he  married  a  wife  as  poor  as 
himself,  and  took  up  his  father's  trade  of  pot  and  kettle 
mender.  Before  this,  however,  there  had  begun  in  him 
a  spiritual  struggle  so  terrible  and  so  vivid,  as  we  see  it  in 
the  pages  of  his  Grace  Abounding  to  the  Chief  of  Sinners 
(published  1665),  that  by  contrast  the  events  of  his  outer 
life  are  pallid  and  unreal.  As  he  wrestled  and  played  at 
tip-cat  with  his  village  mates  on  the  green,  or  stood  in 
the  tower  of  the  church  to  watch  the  bell-ringing,  he  was 
haunted  by  thoughts  of  sudden  death,  of  the  Judgment 
Day,  and  of  his  soul's  damnation.  He  saw  an  awful  face 
looking  down  from  the  clouds,  and  heard  a  voice  asking 
whether  he  would  leave  his  sins  and  go  to  heaven,  or 
have  his  sins  and  go  to  hell.  The  tiles  upon  the  house- 
roofs,  the  puddles  in  the  road,  spoke  to  him  with  voices 
of  temptation  and  mockery.  From  this  religious  insanity 
he  was  rescued  by  a  Mr.  Gifford,  a  local  preacher,  who 
gave  him  comfort  and  courage.  Soon  Bunyan  himself 
began  to  preach;  and  a  revulsion  of  feeling  now  lifted 
him  to  heights  of  ecstatic  joy  in  the  mercifulness  of  God 


NON-DRAMATIC   LITERATURE  195 

and  the  beauty  of  holiness.  He  saw  Christ  himself  look- 
ing down  at  him  through  the  tiles  of  the  house-roof,  say- 
ing, "My  grace  is  sufficient  for  thee";  and  the  sense  of 
salvation  came  like  a  "sudden  noise  of  wind  rushing  in 
at  the  window,  but  very  pleasant."  In  all  this  we  see  in 
its  most  intense  form  the  religious  excitement  of  the  sev- 
enteenth century,  and  also  the  qualities  of  imagination 
and  feeling  which  make  Bunyan  so  powerful  a  writer. 

At  the  Restoration,  persecution  of  the  nonconformist 
sects  began.     Bunyan  was  arrested  for  holding  illegal  re- 
ligious meetings;  and  he  spent  the  next  twelve 
years  in  confinement,  earning  bread  for  his       Jat.er 
family   by  putting   tags   to   shoe-laces,    and 
keeping  his  mind  awake  by  writing  what  he 
was  no  longer  at  liberty  to  speak.     After  his  release  in 
.'672  he  was  subjected  to  shorter  terms  of  arrest,  during 
one  of  which  he  expanded  the  trite  metaphor  of  a  jour- 
ney to  typify  the  Christian  life  into  a  book,  and  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  one  of  the  three  great  allegories  of  the  world's 
literature,1  was  written.     He  published  it  in  1678. 

It  furnished  the  simple  Bedfordshire  cottagers  for  whom 
it  was  written  with   a    reflection   of   their   own   inmost 
struggles  and  aspirations,   in   a  form  which 
rombined  the  fascinations  of  the  novel,  the      Matter?" 
fairy-tale,    and    the   romance    of   adventure. 
The  novel,  the  great  literary  discovery  of  the  next  cen- 
tury, appears  here  in  its  germ.     Not  only  is  the  phys- 
ical world  through  which  Christian  journeys  from   the 
"Wicket-gate"  to  the  Land  of  Beulah  pictured  with  the 
most  familiar  realism;  but  the  wayfarers  whom  he  meets 
are  such  as  might  have  been  seen  in  Bunyan's  day  on  any 
English  market  road— portly  Mr.  Worldly- Wiseman,  full 
of  prudential  saws;  blundering,  self-confident  young  Ig- 
norance;  "gentlemanlike"  Demas,  and  sweet,  talkative 

1  The  others  alluded  to  are  Spenser's  Faerie  Queene  and  Dante's  Divine 
Comedy. 


196  A   HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Piety.  The  landscape,  the  houses,  the  people,  are  all 
given  with  quaint,  sturdy  strokes  which  stamp  them  upon 
the  memory  forever;  so  that  it  is  almost  impossible  for  a 
reader  of  Pilgrim's  Progress  to  think  of  the  journey  other- 
wise than  as  a  real  personal  experience.  And  added  to 
the  charm  which  the  book  has  as  realism  is  its  charm  as 
romance.  If,  in  one  sense,  it  may  be  said  to  have  ushered 
in  the  eighteenth-century  novel,  in  another  it  may  be 
said  to  have  revived  the  mediaeval  romance,  in  which  the 
hero  was  made  to  contend  against  dangers  natural  and 
supernatural,  on  the  way  to  the  goal  of  his  desires.  Giant 
Despair  in  his  grim  castle,  the  obscene  devils  creeping  and 
muttering  in  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow,  the  dreadful 
enemy  Apollyon.  the  angels  and  archangels  who  lead  the 
way,  with  harpings  and  hosannas,  from  the  dread  River 
of  Death  to  the  shining  gates  of  the  Celestial  City,  give 
to  the  story  an  element  of  marvel  and  adventure  which 
immensely  increases  its  appeal.  If  we  add  to  this  the 
charm  of  its  style,  so  quaintly  graphic,  so 
humorously  direct,  so  tender  and  rich  and 
lyrical  when  the  author  is  moved  by  the  beauty  of  his 
vision,  it  seems  no  matter  for  surprise  that  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  before  Bunyan's  death,  was  read  with  delight, 
not  only  throughout  England,  but  in  France,  in  Holland, 
and  in  the  far-off  colonies  of  America. 

Bunyan's  later  work  included  the  Second  Part  of  Pil- 
grim's Progress,  which  narrates  the  journey  of  Bunyan's 
wife,  Christiana,  and  her  children  to  the 
Celestial  City,  under  the  guidance  of  Mr. 
Greatheart.  He  wrote  also  another  allegory 
called  Tlie  Holy  War  (1682),  which  represents  the  Chris- 
tian life  under  the  figure  of  warfare  instead  of  a  journey. 
Most  notable,  however,  is  the  antitype  of  Christian  pre- 
sented in  The  Life  and  Death  of  Mr.  Badman  (1680). 
Here  Bunyan  adopts  the  form  of  a  dialogue  between  Mr. 
Wiseman  and  Mr.  Attentive.  The  former  narrates  the 


NON-DRAMATIC    LITERATURE  197 

progress  through  sin  to  unhallowed  death  of  an  unregen- 
erate  boy  and  man,  who  from  lying  and  Sabbath-break- 
ing descends  to  fraudulent  bankruptcy,  drunkenness,  and 
vice— a  rogue  story  with  a  moral  purpose,  and  a  very 
real  study  of  middle-class  corruption  in  a  provincial  town 
like  Bedford.  It  is  this  realism  which  makes  the  work  a 
forerunner  of  the  novels  of  Defoe  in  the  next  century. 

As  Paradise  Lost  is  the  epic  of  Puritanism  in  its 
external  and  theological  aspect,  Pilgrim's  Progress  is 
the  epic  of  Puritanism  in  its  inner  and  emo- 

,       ,  —,,  ^  End  of  the 

tional  phases.     I  hey  are   together  the   two    Romantic 
great  final  products  of  that  intellectual  and    Literature  of 

'     .    ,.  .ii-,  ,1  Ai       T%          -  t*16  Century. 

artistic  revival  which  we  call  the  Renaissance, 
and  of  that  religious  revival  which  we  calJ  the  Reforma- 
tion. They  mark  the  end  of  the  stream  oi  literature 
which  flows  down  into  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth 
century  from  its  source  in  the  later  reign  of  Henry  VIII 
and  in  the  early  Elizabethan  age.  We  must  now  turn  to 
consider  a  stream  of  literature  of  a  very  different  kind, 
which  began  in  a  revolt  against  the  extravagance  and 
formlessness  of  the  reigning  "romantic"  style,  and  which 
at  the  Restoration  assumed  an  authority  which  it  main- 
tained uninterruptedly  for  nearly  a  hundred  years. 


, 

estoration. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE    SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY:    THE    RESTORATION 

THE  date  1660  is  one  of  the  most  significant  in  the  his- 
tory of  English  literature,  as  it  is  in  the  history  of  English 
politics.  In  that  year  Charles  II  was  brought 
to  the  throne  from  which  his  father  had  been 
driven.  The  extravagant  joy  with  which  the 
King  was  received  on  his  return  from  exile  showed  how 
closely  this  change  of  government  from  commonwealth 
to  kingship  corresponded  to  a  change  in  the  mood  of  tru 
nation.  The  passionate  absorption  in  other-worldliness, 
which  was  the  essence  of  Puritanism,  had,  as  we  haw 
seen,  checked  the  frank  delight  in  this  world,  and  interest 
in  the  problem  of  living  successfully  there,  which  were  o( 
the  Renaissance.  But  the  Puritan  ideal,  by  its  very 
nature,  could  appeal  directly  to  comparatively  few.  In- 
directly, indeed,  by  force  of  example,  it  influenced  many; 
but  the  multitude  at  length  grew  weary  of  playing  a  part 
so  exhausting  and  so  difficult.  During  the  latter  years 
of  the  Commonwealth  signs  of  a  relaxed  temper  on  the 
part  of  the  public  were  not  lacking;  for  example,  licenses 
were  given  for  operas  to  be  performed  in  London.  When 
at  length  the  leaders  of  the  Commonwealth  forsook  their 
own  ideal  and  confessed  it's  failure,  the  mass  of  the 
nation  turned  with  relief  to  the  pleasures  and  interests 
of  the  present  world,  ready  to  regard  with  compla- 
cency even  the  excesses  that  characterized  the  court  of 
Charles  II. 

The  Restoration  period  must  not  be  thought  of,  how- 
ever, as  a  continuation  of  the  interrupted  Renaissance. 
198 


THE   RESTORATION  199 

Between  them  there  is  an  important  difference.  In  the 
n  ge  of  Elizabeth,  as  in  the  age  of  Charles  II  and  his  suc- 
cessors, the  leading  motive  was  indeed  the 
exhibition  of  physical  and  mental  power  on 


!  he  stage  of  this  life,   but   the    Elizabethan    ?«"<*!  of  the 
J  liought  of  this  life  not  as  limited  and  con-    and  that  of 


*  racted  by  circumstances  and  conditions,  but 
as  having  unmeasured  possibilities.  Not  only 
the  geographical  world,  but  the  intellectual  world,  also, 
was  being  enlarged  and  thrown  open.  The  bounds  of 
human  thought,  as  well  as  those  of  human  activity, 
seemed  infinitely  remote;  the  imagination  dealing  with 
power,  as  in  Marlowe,  or  with  knowledge,  as  in  Bacon, 
took  wings  to  itself  and  flew.  But  in  the  temperament 
»:f  the  Restoration  period  there  was  dependence  on  the  re- 
sources of  actual  life,  without  faith  in  the  extension  of 
those  resources.  There  was  the  disposition  to  accept  the 
^resent  in  its  narrow  sense,  to  exploit  life  on  the  narrow 
.sjounds  that  circumstances  afforded. 

This  sense  of  present  fact,  of  realism,  as  distinguished 
.Vrom  the  transcendentalism  of  Renaissance  and  Puritan 
thought,  is  the  chief  characteristic  of  the 

07  Characterise 

mood  of  the  century  which  succeeded  the  tics  of  the 
Restoration.  In  science  it  sjiowed  itself  in 
;;n  absorption  in  the  details  of  investigation, 
as  opposed  to  the  generalizations  of  Bacon.  In  politics 
it  showed  itself  in  the  interest  in  actual  conditions,  as 
opposed  to  dreams  of  theocracy.  In  all  directions  it  ap- 
peared as  a  disposition  toward  conservatism  and  modera- 
tion. Men  had  learned  to  fear  individual  enthusiasm, 
and  therefore  they  tried  to  discourage  it  by  setting  up 
ideals  of  conduct  in  accordance  with  reason  and  common 
sense,  to  which  all  men  should  adapt  themselves.  They 
tried  to  look  alike,  to  behave  alike,  to  write  alike.  Rules 
of  etiquette  and  social  conventions  were  established, 
and  the  problem  of  life  became  that  of  self-expres- 


200  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sion  within   the  narrow  bounds  which  were   thus   pre- 
scribed. 

The  literature  of  the  period  reflects  these  tendencies. 
On  its  serious  side  it  is  largely  concerned  with  politics, 
that  is,  with  the  effort  of  men  to  organize  the 

state'  and  to  ®ve  lt  Power  sufficient  to  restrain 
individual  ambition.  The  lighter  literature 
reflects  the  interest  of  men  in  learning  to  live  with  one 
another.  Naturally,  it  is  much  concerned  with  life  in 
town,  and  with  details  of  dress  and  manners  which  are 
important  there.  But  the  most  noteworthy  evidence  of 
the  temper  of  the  time  in  literature  is  the  tacit  agreement 
of  writers,  both  in  prose  and  poetry,  upon  rules  and  prin- 
ciples in  accordance  with  which  they  should  write.  The 
acceptance  of  these  literary  conventions  drawn  from  the 
practice  of  writers  of  the  past,  marks  the  difference  be- 
tween the  classic  age  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  and  the  roman- 
tic, individualistic  epoch  of  Spenser  and  Shakespeare. 

In  this  difference  the  influence  of  France  counted  for 

much.     There  the  reaction  against  the  poetic  license  of 

the  Renaissance  had  set  in  somewhat  earlier, 

The  at  the  time  when  Henry  IV  and  Richelieu 

Influence  of  .       .         .  .      .  f         , 

France.  were  laying  foundations  for  the  reconstruction 

of  the  French  monarchy;  and  represents  a 
sort  of  corresponding  establishment  of  order  and  dis- 
cipline in  literature.  The  influence  of  Corneille  and 
Racine,  who  developed  a  drama  on  the  lines  of  Latin 
tragedy,  succeeding  where  the  English  classicists  of  the 
sixteenth  century  had  signally  failed,  and  of  Moliere,  who 
developed  realistic  comedy,  in  prose  and  verse,  is  impor- 
tant. It  must  be  remembered  that  many  Englishmen  of 
the  class  which  cared  for  literature  and  the  stage  spent 
years  of  exile  in  France,  and  naturally  came  to  accept  the 
principles  of  French  taste.  Through  the  new  artistic  con- 
ceptions brought  back  to  England  by  the  exiles,  French 
influence  upon  English  literature,  especially  upon  the 
English  drama,  was  strengthened.  To  their  notions  of 


THE    RESTORATION  2OI 

refinement  the  license  of  the  older  dramatists  seemed 
uncouth.  "I  have  seen  Hamlet,"  wrote  Evelyn,  "but 
now  these  old  plays  begin  to  disgust  this  refined  century, 
since  their  majesties  have  been  so  long  abroad."  Alto- 
gether, though  English  literature  of  the  Restoration  is  a 
genuine  native  growth,  in  accordance  with  tendencies 
which  can  be  discerned  in  the  early  seventeenth  century, 
particularly  in  the  work  of  Ben  Jonson,  yet  the  example 
of  France,  like  that  of  Italy  at  an  earlier  period,  was  im- 
portant in  giving  definiteness  to  movements  which  other- 
wise might  have  been  tentative  and  hesitating. 

The  most  striking  way  in  which  English  poetry  reflected 
the  spirit  of  the  new  era  was  in  its  substitution  of  a  single 
measurably  perfect  form  for  the  varied  law- 
lessness of  the  age  which  had  gone  before. 
This  form,  called  the  heroic  couplet,  consisted 
of  two  pentameter  lines  connected  by  rhyme.  It  had 
been  used  in  earlier  periods,  for  example  by  Chaucer;  but 
in  his  hands  the  couplet  had  not  been  necessarily  a  unit, 
the  thought  having  often  been  drawn  out  into  the  suc- 
ceeding pair  of  verses,  with  no  pause  at  the  rhyming  word. 
And  in  the  period  of  romanticism  which  followed  the 
eighteenth  century  the  couplet  was  once  more  used  with 
the  old  freedom.  The  literary  ideals  of  the  Restoration, 
as  contrasted  with  those  of  the  romantic  school,  may  be 
illustrated  by  the  comparison  of  a  few  lines  from  Keats, 
such  as  these  from  the  beginning  of  Endymion : 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  forever: 

Its  loveliness  increases;  it  will  never 

Pass  into  nothingness;  but  still  will  keep 

A  bower  quiet  for  us,  and  a  sleep 

Full  of  sweet  dreams,  and  health,  and  quiet  breathing; 

with  these  from  The  Hind  and  the  Panther  of  Dryden: 

A  milk-white  hind,  immortal  and  unchanged, 
Fed  on  the  lawns,  and  in  the  forest  rang'd; 
Without  unspotted,  innocent  within, 
She  fear'd  no  danger  for  she  knew  no  sin. 


202       A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

In  the  first,  it  is  clear,  the  couplet  exerts  little  control  over 
the  thought;  in  the  second  the  thought  is  limited  and 
regulated  by  the  acceptance  of  a  precise  and  narrow  form; 
and  this  limitation  and  regulation  were  of  the  essence  oi 
Restoration  poetry. 

Among  the  first  writers  to  use  consistently  the  closed 
couplet  was  Edmund  Waller  (1605-1687).     As  early  as 
1623,  in  lines  on  "His  Majesty's  Escape  at 
Saint  Andrew,"  he  set  the  steady,  measured 
step  which  succeeding  poets  were  to  follow 
with  military  precision  for  more  than  a  century.     His  in- 
fluence, however,  became  predominant  only  through  the 
extraordinary  energy  and  success  of  his  pupil,  the  great- 
est literary  figure  of  the  age  of  Charles  II,  John  Dryden. 
Dryden  was  born  in  1631  at  Aldwinkle,  in  Northamp- 
tonshire, his  parents  being  of  the  upper  middle  class,  and 
of  Puritan  sympathies.     He  was  sent  to  West- 
minster  School,  and  thence,  in  1650,  to  Trin- 


ity College,  Cambridge,  where  he  remained 
seven  years.  During  this  time  his  father  died,  leaving 
him  a  small  property.  His  first  important  verse  was  an 
elegy  on  the  death  of  Cromwell,  written  in  1658.  Two 
years  later,  however,  Dryden,  with  the  mass  of  English- 
men, had  become  an  ardent  Royalist;  and  he  welcomed 
the  return  of  Charles  in  a  poem  in  couplets  called  Astraa 
Redux.  In  1663  he  married  Lady  Elizabeth  Howard,  a 
woman  of  higher  rank  than  his  own.  It  may  have  been 
the  desirability  of  increasing  his  income  that,  just  before 
this  marriage,  drove  Dryden  to  write  his  first  comedy, 
The  Wild  Gallant.  It  certainly  was  his  accumulating 
financial  necessities  that  kept  him  writing  for  the  stage 
constantly  down  to  1681.  During  this  period  his  only 
poem  of  importance  was  Annus  Mirabilis  (1667).  a  chron- 
icle of  events  of  the  preceding  year,  which  had  been  dis- 
tinguished by  several  victories  at  sea  over  the  Dutch,  and 
by  the  great  London  fire. 


THE   RESTORATION  203 

In  1 68 1  Dryden  began  the  succession  of  political  poems 
which  have  generally  been  accounted  his  best  works. 
The  times  were  troubled.  The  court  and  the 
country  were  divided  between  the  partisans 
of  the  King's  brother,  who,  though  a  Papist,  was  recog- 
nized as  the  heir  to  the  throne,  and  those  of  the  King's 
illegitimate  son,  the  Duke  of  Monmouth,  whom  certain 
persons  zealous  for  the  Protestant  faith  were  disposed  to 
set  up  as  a  rival  candidate.  The  leader  of  the  latter  party 
was  the  Earl  of  Shaftesbury.  In  the  story  of  the  revolt 
of  Absalom  against  King  David,  Dryden  found  an  apt 
parallel  to  existing  circumstances  in  England;  and  his 
satire  Absalom  and  Achitophel  exposed  the  relations  of 
Monmouth,  the  prince,  and  Shaftesbury,  the  evil  counsel- 
lor, with  merciless  humor.  The  poem  became  immensely 
popular.  The  next  year  Dryden  followed  it  with  a  sec- 
ond blow  at  Shaftesbury  in  The  Medal.  Then  he  turned 
aside  in  MacFlecknoe  to  attack  a  rival  poet,  Shadwell, 
who  had  been  employed  by  the  Whigs  to  reply  to  The 
Medal.  In  this  year,  also,  Dryden  extended  his  range 
into  the  field  of  religious  controversy,  with  Religio  Laid, 
a  very  temperate  statement  of  a  layman's  faith  in  the 
Church  of  England.  Three  years  after  this  confession  of 
faith  Dryden  became  a  Roman  Catholic,  and  in  1687  he 
published  a  political  defense  of  the  Church  of  Rome  called 
The  Hind  and  the  Panther. 

This  political  and  religious  writing  brought  him  dis- 
tinction and  a  modest  income.  In  1670  he  was  made 
Historiographer  Royal  and  Poet  Laureate,  ffis  Later 
with  a  salary  of  two  hundred  pounds  a  year.  works/ 
Later  he  received  a  pension  of  a  hundred 
pounds  a  year,  and  in  1683  he  was  made  Collector  of  the 
Port  of  London.  All  these  honors  and  emoluments  he 
lost  in  consequence  of  the  Revolution  of  1688  and  the 
accession  of  William  III.  He  was  obliged  to  betake  him- 
self again  to  the  stage  as  the  most  lucrative  department 


204  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  literature;  to  accept  aid  from  private  patrons  in  place 
of  the  royal  bounty;  to  contract  with  Tonson,  the  book- 
seller, to  produce  and  deliver  ten  thousand  lines  of  verse 
for  three  hundred  guineas,  and  to  undertake  various  jobs 
of  translation  for  the  same  employer.  In  short,  in  his 
old  age  Dryden  was  compelled  to  illustrate  almost  all  the 
methods  by  which  a  literary  man  could  live.  Neverthe- 
less, his  production  in  these  years  added  much  to  his 
fame.  Whatever  may  be  thought  of  his  poetical  quali- 
ties, at  least  his  literary  energy  lasted  well.  His  work  of 
this  time  includes  his  translation  of  Virgil;  many  of  his 
translations  from  Horace,  Ovid,  Juvenal,  Persius,  and 
Homer;  and  his  renderings  into  modern  English  verse  of 
stories  from  Chaucer,  among  which  the  Palamon  and 
Arcite  is  best  known.  These  twice-told  tales  were  pub- 
lished in  1700,  in  a  volume  of  Fables. 

During  these  last  years  Dryden  lived  constantly  in 
London.  The  coffee-house  of  that  day  was  the  chief 

place  of  resort  for  literary  men,  much  as  the 
Years. S  Paris  cafe  has  been  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

At  Will's  or  Button's  the  wits  gathered  for 
exchange  of  courtesies  or  for  combat;  there  their  admirers 
or  patrons  met  them,  and  thence  went  forth  the  criticism 
that  made  or  marred  the  fortunes  of  rising  men  as  surely 
as  do  the  anonymous  reviews  in  a  modern  literary  journal. 
Dryden  frequented  Will's,  where  he  was  as  much  a  mon- 
arch as  Ben  Jonson  had  been  at  the  Mermaid,  or  as,  a 
century  later,  Samuel  Johnson  was  at  the  Literary  Club. 
It  was  to  Will's  that  young  Pope  was  brought  to  gaze  on 
greatness  and  be  inspired;  and  it  was  there  also  that  Dry- 
den dismissed  his  youthful  relative  with  the  pitying 
"Cousin  Swift,  you  will  never  be  a  poet." 

The  life  of  Dryden  seems  at  first  sight  to  have  been  an 
unheroic,  and  in  some  ways  an  ignoble,  one.  His  changes 
of  side  from  Cromwellian  to  Royalist,  from  Anglican  to 
Catholic,  stand  out  in  unfavorable  contrast  to  the  de- 


THE   RESTORATION  205 

votion  of  men  like  More  and  Milton.  His  concern  with 
the  details  of  party  strife  is  sharply  opposed  to  the  ideal 
morality  of  Sidney  and  of  Spenser.  His  in- 
difference and  acquiescence  in  matters  of  character 
belief  seem  tame  and  watery  after  the  flame- 
like  faith  of  Bunyan.  But  we  must  not  let  such  compari- 
sons carry  us  too  far.  Dryden  illustrates  the  change 
from  the  virtues  of  Elizabethan  chivalry  and  Cromwellian 
fanaticism  to  the  sober  commonplace  ethics  of  an  era  of 
reason.  His  tendency  to  shift  his  influence  to  the  win- 
ning side  was  in  part  the  patriotism  of  a  sensible  man 
who  argued  that  it  mattered  comparatively  little  whether 
the  country  was  ruled  by  Protector  or  King,  whether  it 
worshipped  according  to  Anglican  or  Catholic  rites,  so 
long  as  it  was  at  peace  under  institutions  which  were 
strong  enough  to  curb  individual  turbulence.  Moreover, 
to  Dryden  it  doubtless  seemed  far  less  important  that  he 
should  preserve  an  unspotted  consistency  in  his  life,  than 
that  he  should  support  his  family.  His  was  at  bottom 
that  uninspiring  but  necessary  virtue  which  chiefly  seeks 
to  do  useful  work  for  a  living  wage. 

There  is  also  a  temptation  to  extend  the  first  harsh 
judgment  of  Dryden's  life  to  his  poetry.  It,  too,  lacks 
elevation.  In  the  first  place  the  material  of  ^ 
much  of  it  is  borrowed  from  other  writers.  Substance 
But  we  must  remember  that  in  his  long  labors 
of  translation  and  adaptation,  Dryden  was 
fulfilling  the  requirements  of  his  age.  The  time  was  one 
not  of  creation,  but  of  criticism;  one  of  steady  assimila- 
tion of  what  earlier  ages  had  produced.  It  was  especially 
eager  in  its  effort  to  diffuse  and  appropriate  the  ideals  of 
Latin  civilization,  and  in  this  diffusion  the  work  of  Dry- 
den counted  for  much.  In  the  second  place,  the  subject- 
matter  of  his  original  poetry,  the  affairs  of  church  and 
state,  is  remote  from  what  we  regard  as  poetic.  But  here 
again  Dryden  was  responding  to  the  demands  of  his  age. 


206        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

In  the  days  of  Charles  II  men  were  weary  of  revolution. 
To  them  the  kingship  and  the  church,  Anglican  or  Catho- 
lic, were  interesting  and  beautiful,  because  they  repre- 
sented, for  the  mass  of  the  nation,  an  ideal  of  individual 
restraint;  just  as  to  an  earlier  time  the  boundless  self- 
assertion  of  Faustus  and  Tamburlaine  had  been  interest- 
ing and  beautiful  for  the  opposite  reason. 

Not  only  the  substance  but  the  form  of  Dryden's  verse 
has  been  a  ground  for  detraction  from  his  fame.  Few 

poets  of  the  modern  world  have  maintained 
The  Quality  such  strict  uniformity.  With  the  exception 
Poefry.  of  the  lyrics  in  his  dramas,  of  several  odes, 

and  of  two  early  poems  in  the  heroic  stanza, 
Dryden  cultivated  steadily  the  heroic  couplet.  Histori- 
cally the  account  of  this  form  has  been  given  (page  201). 
The  heroic  couplet  appealed  with  irresistible  force  to  an 
age  weary  of  the  conceits  of  feeble  romanticists,  and  de- 
siring, above  all,  uniformity,  precision,  and  regularity.  It 
was,  moreover,  a  vehicle  strikingly  adapted  to  the  con- 
veyance of  the  literary  baggage  of  the  time.  When  at 
the  close  of  Religio  Laid  Dryden  says, 

And  this  unpolished  rugged  verse  I  chose 
As  fittest  for  discourse,  and  nearest  prose, 

his  second  line  may  be  taken  as  referring  to  his  poems  in 
general.  In  them  we  look  for  the  virtues  of  prose  rather 
than  for  those  of  poetry,  for  the  utilitarian  qualities,  neat- 
ness, clearness,  energy,  rather  than  for  imaginative  sug- 
gestion; we  look  for  epigram  in  place  of  metaphor,  for 
boldly  marked  rhythm  instead  of  elusive  harmony. 

Although  in  the  great  body  of  his  work  Dryden  kept 
to  the  couplet  form,  his  odes,  and  the  songs  with  which 
his  dramas  are  strewn,  show  that  he  possessed  power  over 
a  variety  of  metres.  The  two  odes  for  Saint  Cecilia's 
day,  especially  the  second,  called  "Alexander's  Feast." 
^lustrate  his  skill  in  making  his  lines  march  to  the  mea- 


THE   RESTORATION  207 

sure  of  his  thought.  It  is  true,  even  in  his  lyrics  Dry- 
den's  charm  is  rather  one  of  line  and  general  movement 
than  of  phrase  or  word.  He  has  little  of  the  magic  and 
glamour  that  belong  to  poets  of  deeper,  though  perhaps 
less  ample,  inspiration.  His  best  quality  is  artistic  and 
literary,  not  imaginative. 

Dryden  was  not  only  the  foremost  poet,  but  also  the 
most  copious  dramatist,  and  the  chief  critic  of  his  time. 
The  age  of  the  Restoration  was,  as  we  have 
already  noted,  a  period  of  assimilation  rather 
than  of  creation,  a  time  when  men  were  in- 
terested in  testing  the  product  of  earlier  ages,  and  in 
winnowing  the  good  from  the  bad.  This  interest  ac- 
counts for  the  fact  that  to  many  of  his  works  Dryden 
prefixed  one  or  more  critical  essays  in  the  form  of  dedi- 
cations or  prefaces,  in  which  he  discussed  the  leading 
artistic  questions  of  the  day.  Among  these  essays  the 
most  important  are  "An  Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy" 
(1668),  "A  Defense  of  an  Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy" 
(1668),  "Of  Heroic  Plays"  (1672),  the  "Essay  on  Satire" 
(1693),  and  the  Preface  to  the  Fables  (1700).  It  is  to  be 
noted  that  these  writings  were  all  "occasional,"  each  put 
forth  to  answer  a  particular  purpose;  and  in  the  success 
with  which  they  fulfilled  their  purpose  they  are  one  im- 
portant sign  of  literary  progress.  The  virtue  of  efficiency 
in  prose  style  was  strengthened  enormously  by  Dryden's 
practice. 

Dryden's  prose  lacks  the  personal  eccentricity  which 
we  find  in  Burton,  Browne,  and  their  contemporaries;  and 
it  is  usually  without  the  artificial  decoration 
which  marks  the  style  of  Lyly  and  Sidney.          p2se.na 
He  was  chiefly  occupied  in  securing  its  fit- 
ness for  a  well-defined  end.     Moreover,  by  his  adoption 
of  the  modern  sentence  in  place  of  the  unit  of  great  and 
unequal  length  used  by  Raleigh  and  Milton,  Dryden  car- 
ried out  in  prose  a  change  exactly  analogous  to  that  ac- 


208  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

complished  in  verse  by  his  adoption  of  the  couplet  in 
place  of  the  stanza.  In  other  words,  he  did  for  prose 
what  he  did  for  poetry:  he  reduced  the  unit  of  treatment 
to  manageable  size;  set  an  example  of  correctness;  and 
finally,  by  his  authority,  did  much  to  establish  such  a 
standard  of  taste  as  rendered  impossible  the  eccentricities 
to  which  the  preceding  century  had  been  indulgent. 

In  both  his  poetry  and  his  prose  Dryden  represents  the 

spirit  of  his  age  as  it  showed  itself  in  dealing  with  its 

most  important  problems  of  life  and  art.     He 

^etl       ,    is  at  bottom  a  serious  and  intellectual  mas- 

"  Hudibras." 

ter.  For  the  more  naive  and  unconscious 
expression  of  the  time  we  must  turn  to  others.  Like 
Elizabeth  and  Charles  I,  Charles  II  kept  in  some  sort  a 
literary  court,  of  which  lyric  poetry  and  satire  were  the 
language.  The  courtly  poets  of  the  time,  the  successors 
of  the  Cavaliers,  caught  from  the  King  an  attitude  of 
moral  indifference  and  social  flippancy.  In  their  circles 
the  most  popular  work  was  a  fierce  and  scurrilous  satire 
upon  the  Puritan,  Samuel  Butler's  Hudibras.  Butler 
(1612-1680)  was  doubtless  meditating  his  attack  during 
the  years  of  the  Protectorate,  when  he  was  acting  as  pri- 
vate secretary  to  a  Puritan  nobleman.  Three  years  after 
the  accession  of  Charles  II  he  published  three  cantos  of 
a  poem  in  which  the  vices  of  the  Puritan  period,  hypoc- 
risy, sanctimoniousness,  and  intolerance,  are  presented 
with  savage  exaggeration  in  the  person  of  Sir  Hudibras. 
Hudibras  is  in  effect  a  piece  of  that  character  writing 
which  was  popular  in  the  seventeenth  century  (see  page 
1 80),  and  of  which  Butler  left  many  examples.  It  is 
written  in  rough  verse  of  four  feet,  with  double  rhymes 
for  humorous  effect,  very  different  from  the  polished 
heroic  couplet  of  Dryden's  satire.  Some  of  the  more 
trenchant  comments  on  Puritan  defects  have  passed  into 
proverbs,  as: 

Compound  for  sins  they  are  inclined  to, 
By  damning  those  they  have  no  mind  to. 


THE  RESTORATION  209 

It  is  also  a  mock  heroic  romance  after  the  type  of  Don 
Quixote.  Like  his  prototype,  Hudibras,  with  his  squire 
Ralpho,  falls  into  one  ridiculous  situation  after  another, 
which  are  continued  in  further  instalments  of  the  poem, 
published  in  1664  and  1678. 

While  Butler  and  the  Cavalier  poets  were  embodying 
the  mood  of  the  aristocracy,  Bunyan  was  writing  his  Pil- 
grim's Progress  for  the  serious  lower  class, 
where  Puritanism  still  survived.  Between 
these  extremes,  however,  we  have  an  order 
that  was  to  make  its  presence  felt  increasingly  from  this 
time  on,  the  middle  or  burgher  class;  and  as  it  happens, 
this  class  had,  in  the  late  seventeenth  century,  a  repre- 
sentative figure  almost  as  salient  as  Bunyan.  Samuel 
Pepys  (1633-1703)  was  a  busy  man  of  affairs,  a  clerk  of 
the  Navy  Board,  and  later  Secretary  of  the  Admiralty 
under  James  II.  Between  1660  and  1669  he  kept  a  diary 
in  cipher,  which  he  left  with  his  library  to  Magdalen  Col- 
lege, Cambridge.  It  was  deciphered  and  published,  at 
first  with  omissions,  later  in  full,  in  the  course  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  and  was  recognized  at  once  as  a  personal 
document  of  great  interest. 

Pepys's  diary  is  scarcely  to  be  called  literature.  It  is 
a  transcript  of  the  observations,  doings,  thoughts,  and 
feelings  of  a  commonplace  burgher,  all  set 
down  with  the  greatest  fidelity.  If  Pepys 
goes  on  a  picnic  he  mentions  the  time  of 
starting,  the  constituents  of  the  luncheon,  the  substance 
of  the  conversation  by  the  way,  the  company  he  met,  the 
sheep  which  he  saw  ("the  most  pleasant  and  innocent 
sight  that  ever  I  saw  in  my  life"),  the  shepherd  whose 
little  boy  was  reading  the  Bible  to  him,  the  flowers,  the 
glowworms  which  came  out  in  the  evening,  and  the 
slight  accident  by  which  he  sprained  his  foot.  In  its  de- 
tail it  reflects  the  patient,  industrious  habits  by  which 
business  and  science  were  to  thrive  in  the  next  century— 
for  Pepys  was  a  scientist  and  president  of  the  Royal 


210  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Society.  In  its  uniformity  of  tone,  its  lack  of  emphasis 
and  dramatic  interest,  so  different  from  Bunyan's  Grace 
Abounding,  it  illustrates  again  the  sober  modernity  which 
the  citizen's  life  was  beginning  to  assume.  In  its  world- 
liness,  its  reflection  of  perfectly  unashamed  delight  in 
mere  comfort,  well-being,  and  success,  it  shows  the  bour- 
geois ideal  of  life."  In  its  suggestions  of  moral  laxity  it 
perhaps  testifies  to  the  complacence  with  which  even  safe 
and  honest  burghers  saw  the  natural  life  free  itself  from 
Puritan  scruples.  And  finally,  the  pleasure  in  his  own 
life,  which  sustained  the  author  in  the  mechanical  toil  of 
recording  its  phenomena,  is  to  be  connected  with  the  in- 
terest in  human  life  in  general  which  constituted  the 
force  behind  the  development  of  realistic  fiction  in  the 
following  century. 

THE  RESTORATION  DRAMA 

When  the  theatres  were  closed  in  1642,  the  succession 
of  great  Jacobean  dramatists  had  nearly  come  to  an  end, 

Shirley  alone  being  alive.  However,  the 
Play  ei  drama  retained  its  hold  on  the  masses;  even 

under  Cromwell,  the  playwright  Davenant 
obtained  permission  to  give  a  play  with  a  musical  accom- 
paniment, The  Siege  of  Rhodes  (1656) .  To  this  opera  Dry- 
den  attributed  the  beginning  of  the  dominant  fashion  of 
the  time  in  tragedy,  the  heroic  play,  to  which  type  many 
of  Dryden's  own  dramas  belong.  To  the  most  famous  of 
them,  The  Conquest  of  Granada,  he  prefixed  the  essay, 
"Of  Heroic  Plays,"  in  which  he  cites  also  the  example 
of  Ariosto,  with  his  stories  of  love  and  valor,  as  contrib- 
uting to  his  conception.  The  heroic  play,  though  by  no 
means  an  imitation  of  French  tragedy,  owed  something 
to  the  example  of  Corneille,  especially  its  heightening  of 
characters  to  heroic  proportions,  and  probably  also  its 
use  of  rhyme.  Dryden  defended,  the  use  of  rhyme,  in 


THE    RESTORATION     '  211 

the  dedication  to  one  of  his  early  plays,  on  the  ground 
that  "it  bounds  and  circumscribes  the  fancy.  For  imagi- 
nation in  a  poet  is  a  faculty  so  wild  and  lawless,  that  like 
an  high  ranging  spaniel  it  must  have  clogs  tied  to  it  lest 
it  outrun  the  judgment."  This  philosophy,  so  typical  of 
the  time,  did  not  prevent  Dryden  from  pushing  his  char- 
acters into  unnatural  extravagance  of  passion;  a  fault 
which,  as  it  appears  in  The  Indian  Queen  (1664),  The 
Indian  Emperor  (1665),  and  The  Conquest  of  Granada 
(1670),  was  caricatured  in  The  Rehearsal  (1671),  a  fa- 
mous mock  heroic  drama  by  the  Duke  of  Buckingham 
and  others. 

In  the  last  of  his  heroic  plays,  Aurengzebe  (1675),  Dry- 
den  confesses  in  the  prologue  that  he  "  grows  weary  of  his 
long-loved  mistress,  Rhyme."  Accordingly 
his  next  play,  All  for  Love  (1678),  a  rehandling 
of  the  story  of  Antony  and  Cleopatra,  he  Dramas, 
wrote  in  blank  verse.  This  play  is  commonly 
regarded  as  his  dramatic  masterpiece.  In  addition  to  his 
tragedies,  Dryden  wrote  a  number  of  comedies  in  prose, 
and  tragicomedies  in  a  mixture  of  prose  and  verse,  most 
of  which  are  too  broad  for  modern  reading. 

A  writer  who  on  two  occasions  surpassed  Dryden, 
Thomas  Otway  (1651-1685),  was  an  unsuccessful  actor 
who  turned  to  writing  plays.  His  Don  Carlos 
(16^5),  written  in  rhymed  couplets,  won  for 
him  his  first  success.  When  Dryden  aban- 
doned rhyme,  the  world  of  playwrights  changed  with  him; 
and  Otway's  second  important  play,  The  Orphan  (1680), 
was  in  blank  verse.  The  situation,  turning  upon  the 
love  of  two  brothers  for  Monimia,  the  orphan  ward  of 
their  father,  is  one  which  Ford  might  have  created.  In 
working  it  out,  Otway  is  relentless;  he  has  evolved  from 
it  one  of  the  crudest  of  English  tragedies.  In  his  power 
of  deepening  the  horror  by  a  lighter,  simpler  touch,  piti- 
ful as  a  strain  of  music,  he  reminds  us  again  of  the  later 


212  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Elizabethans,  especially  of  Webster.  Even  more  suc- 
cessful than  The  Orphan  was  Venice  Preserved  (1682),  in 
which,  as  in  The  Orphan,  Otway  caught  something  of  the 
greatness  of  handling  characteristic  of  an  earlier  time. 
His  plays  have  the  genuine  passion  which  Dryden  lacked, 
and  they  are  not  marred  by  the  distortions  of  human  life 
and  character  that  abound  both  in  Dryden  and  in  the 
Jacobean  dramatists. 

Except  for  the  plays  mentioned,   the  tragedy  of  the 
Restoration  has,  in  the  main,  only  a  literary  interest,  as 

a  survival  of  the  great  dramatic  period,  and 
Comedyd°n  as  an  illustration  of  foreign  influences.  The 

Restoration  comedy,  however,  is  a  genuine 
reflection  of  the  temper,  if  not  of  the  actual  life,  of  the 
upper  classes  of  the  nation;  and  as  such  it  has  a  sociologi- 
cal as  well  as  a  literary  interest.  As  practised  by  Shake- 
speare, English  comedy  had  been  romantic  in  spirit. 
However  seriously  it  had  been  concerned  with  the  essen- 
tials of  human  nature,  it  had  had  comparatively  little  to 
do  with  the  circumstances  of  actual  human  life.  In  Ben 
Jonson  and  Middleton.  and  especially  in  the  latest  of  the 
Jacobeans,  Shirley,  we  find  more  realistic  treatment  of 
the  setting,  the  social  surroundings,  of  the  play.  Follow- 
ing their  lead,  and  stimulated  by  the  example  of  Moliere, 
the  comedians  of  the  Restoration  devoted  themselves 
specifically  to  picturing  the  external  details  of  life,"  the 
fashions  of  the  time,  its  manners,  its  speech,  its  interests. 
For  scene  they  turned  to  the  most  interesting  places  they 
knew,  the  drawing-rooms,  the  coffee-houses,  the  streets 
and  gardens  of  London.  Their  characters  were  chiefly 
people  of  fashion,  and  their  plots,  for  the  most  part,  were 
love  intrigues,  often  borrowed  from  the  French,  both  de- 
veloped with  clever  dialogue.  In  tendency  these  plays 
are,  almost  without  exception,  immoral.  They  represent 
the  reaction  of  the  playgoing  public  against  Puritanism. 
They  are  antisocial,  in  that  they  represent  social  institu- 


THE   RESTORATION  213 

tions,  particularly  marriage,  in  an  obnoxious  or  ridicu- 
lous light;  but  they  are  not  romantic  or  revolutionary. 
There  is  in  them  never  an  honest  protest  against  institu- 
tions, never  a  genuine  note  of  revolt.  Conventions  are 
accepted  to  be  played  with  and  attacked,  merely  by  way 
of  giving  opportunity  for  clever,  corrupt  talk,  or  point 
to  an  intrigue. 

The  first  of  this  school  of  comedians  was  Sir  George 
Etherege  (1635-1691),  an  Englishman  who  had  been 
educated  at  Paris,  and  who  there  had  seen 
the  comedies  of  Moliere.  Etherege  was  fol-  ^cherley 
lowed  by  William  Wycherley  (1640-1715),  Congreve. 
whose  best  plays  are  The  Country  Wife  (1673) 
and  The  Plain  Dealer  (1674).  Both  are  borrowed  in  out- 
line from  Moliere,  but  their  moral  atmosphere  is  that  of 
the  corrupt  court  of  Charles  II,  where  Wycherley  was  a 
favorite.  William  Congreve  (1670-1729)  was  a  far  more 
brilliant  playwright.  His  masterpieces,  Love  for  Love 
(1695)  and  The  Way  of  the  World  (1700),  carry  the  in- 
terest of  dialogue,  of  the  verbal  fence  between  character 
and  character,  to  its  extreme  development. 

It  has  been  pointed  out  that  one  effect  of  the  age  that 
succeeded  the  Restoration  was  to  organize  society,  to  re- 
strain   the    license    of    the    individual.     The 
antisocial  influence  of  the  plays  of  the  time      *"»?  Protest 

r      j  of  Jeremy 

was  clearly  perceived,  and  protest  was  not  collier, 
lacking.  It  took  time  for  the  protest  to 
gather  force,  in  face  of  the  spirit  of  wild  reaction  against 
all  that  savored  of  Puritanism;  but  in  1698  a  clergyman, 
Jeremy  Collier,  published  his  Short  View  of  the  Profane- 
ness  and  Immorality  of  the  English  Stage,  and  Dryden, 
who  was  one  of  the  dramatists  particularly  attacked,  ad- 
mitted the  justice  of  the  rebuke.  Its  immediate  effect 
was  not  sufficient  to  do  away  with  the  coarseness  of 
Restoration  comedy,  which  appears  to  the  full  in  Sir 
John  Vanbrugh  (1666-1726);  but  an  improvement  is 


214  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

noticeable  in  the  works  of  George  Farquhar  (1678-1707), 
the  last  of  the  school;  and  in  Steele's  plays  the  drama  is 
in  full  alliance  with  the  forces  which  were  making  for 
morality  and  decent  living. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY:    THE    REIGN    OF    CLASSICISM 

THE  history  of  the  early  part  of  the  eighteenth  century 
shows  a  continuation  of   the  social  and  literary  forces 
which  had  begun  with  the  Restoration.     It 
was  a  period  in  which  imagination  slept,  and       General 

u-   i     .1.  f   ^  i          T^  Character- 

in  which  the  sense  of  the  temporal  realities       istics. 

of  life  was  strong.  It  was  a  period  of  criti- 
cism rather  than  of  creation,  a  period  in  which  regularity 
and  perfection  of  literary  form  were  of  more  importance 
than  originality  of  thought.  It  was  an  age  of  interest  in 
the  development  of  society  and  of  institutions,  rather 
than  in  the  assertion  of  the  individual.  In  this  particular, 
indeed,  it  went  beyond  the  Restoration  period.  We  have 
seen  that  the  literature,  especially  the  drama,  of  this 
latter  epoch  was  marked  by  something  of  the  license  of 
the  Renaissance.  The  protest  of  Jeremy  Collier  against 
the  stage,  in  1698,  was  typical  of  the  attitude  of  the  new 
century,  which  realized  and  feared  the  antisocial  effect 
of  vice.  These  tendencies  toward  realism  of  subject- 
matter,  toward  technical  perfection  of  form,  and  toward 
social  usefulness  of  purpose,  are  notably  illustrated  by 
the  three  chief  figures  of  the  literature  of  the  age  of 
Queen  Anne — Swift,  Addison,  and  Pope. 

The  firs't  of  them  and  the  greatest,  Jonathan  Swift,  was 
born  in  Ireland  of  English  parents,  in  1667.  He  was  a 
posthumous  son,  and  he  grew  up  to  share  his 
mother's  poverty.  He  was  sent  to  the  Uni- 
versity  of  Dublin,  where,  as  he  says,  he  was 
"stopped  of  his  degree  for  dulness  and  unsufnciency;  and 
at  last  hardly  admitted  in  a  manner  little  to  his  credit." 
215 


2l6  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

In  1689  he  left  Ireland  to  take  a  position  as  under-secre- 
tary  to  a  distant  relative,  Sir  William  Temple,  with  whom 
he  remained  intermittently  for  some  years,  reading  aloud 
to  his  patron,  writing  at  dictation,  keeping  accounts,  and 
cursing  his  fate.  While  in  this  service  he  wrote  The  Bat- 
tle of  the  Books,  a  contribution  to  the  controversy  which 
Temple  was  carrying  on  with  Bentley,  the  great  scholar, 
as  to  the  comparative  merit  of  ancient  and  modern  writ- 
ers. About  this  time,  also,  he  wrote  a  satire  on  the  divi- 
sions of  Christianity,  called  A  Tale  of  a  Tub.  Neither 
work  was  published  until  1704.  Writh  Temple's  help  he 
entered  the  church;  and  after  his  patron's  death  he  re- 
turned to  Ireland  as  chaplain  to  Lord  Berkeley,  by  whom 
he  was  given  the  living  of  Laracor. 

Then  began  the  great  period  of  Swift's  life,  the  time 
of  his  political  power.     During  the  reign  of  William  III 

party  strife  was  bitter  between  the  Whigs, 
Career!**"  wno  supported  the  King  in  his  foreign  policy 

of  resistance  to  Louis  XIV  of  France,  and  the 
Tories,  who  opposed  him;  and  this  struggle  was  continued 
in  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne.  Almost  all  the  prominent 
literary  men  of  the  time  were  engaged  on  one  side  or  the 
other.  Swift,  who  was  frequently  in  London,  promoting 
his  candidacy  for  offices  in  the  church  as  they  fell  vacant, 
at  first  wrote  on  the  Whig  side;  but  in  1710  he  joined  the 
Tories,  who  were  just  coming  into  power.  The  Tory 
ministry,  of  which  Lord  Bolingbroke  was  a  member,  was 
resolved  to  stop  the  war  with  France;  and  in  defense  of 
this  policy  Swift  put  out  one  of  his  strongest  political 
writings,  The  Conduct  of  the  Allies.  His  life  during  these 
years  is  reflected  in  his  Journal  to  Stella,  a  daily  account 
of  his  doings  which  he  wrote  for  his  friend,  Esther  John- 
son. Here  we  find  Swift  playing  the  part  in  which  he 
most  delighted,  that  of  a  man  of  affairs,  active,  successful, 
and  powerful.  He  records  with  gusto  his  hours  spent 
with  the  rulers  of  the  country;  their  politeness  and  his 


THE   REIGN   OF  CLASSICISM  217 

own  half-contemptuous  familiarity;  his  ability  to  serve 
his  friends  and  to  punish  his  enemies.  In  1713,  as  the 
price  of  his  support  of  the  Tory  government,  he  was 
named  Dean  of  Saint  Patrick's  in  Dublin,  a  promotion 
little  to  his  taste.  The  next  year  the  Tories  went  out 
of  power,  discredited  by  Bolingbroke's  intrigues  with  the 
Pretender;  and  Swift  returned  to  Ireland. 

Here  his  unconquerable  activity  found  vent  in  defend- 
ing the  Irish,  or  rather  the  Englishmen  who  lived  in  Ire- 
land, from  the  careless  tyranny  of  the  govern- 
ment. In  this  endeavor  he  published  The  Se.Latef 
Drapier's  Letters,  most  of  them  in  1724,  as  a 
protest  against  debasing  the  Irish  coinage.  In  1726  he 
took  the  manuscript  of  his  most  famous  work,  Gulliver's 
Travels,  to  London  for  publication,  and  the  next  year  he 
returned  thither  to  taste  the  pleasure  of  a  great  literary 
success.  This,  as  all  else  in  his  life,  seemed  to  turn  only 
to  disappointment.  In  1728  Miss  Johnson,  the  "Stella" 
of  the  Journal,  died.  Whether  or  not  it  is  true,  as  some 
think,  that  Swift  was  secretly  married  to  her,  she  was 
his  closest  friend,  and  her  death  left  him  desolate.  As 
the  years  passed  his  hatred  for  the  world  grew  more  in- 
tense, and  his  satire  more  bitter.  A  disease  from  which 
he  had  suffered  at  intervals  gained  rapidly  upon  him, 
resulting  in  deafness  and  giddiness;  and  he  suffered  also 
from  attacks  of. epilepsy  and  insanity.  After  years  of 
gloom  and  agony,  death  came  slowly  upon  him.  He  died 
in  1745. 

It  is  evident  from  this  narrative  that,  to  a  great  extent, 
Swift's  writings  were  occasional,  and  grew  out  of  the  cir- 
cumstances of  his  life.     He  was  not  a  profes- 
sional writer;  with  one  or  two  exceptions,  his 
works  were  published  anonymously.     He  was          Nature, 
a  man  of  affairs,  who  became  a  man  of  letters 
because  literature  was  a  means  by  which  affairs  could  be 
directed.     His  writings  must  be  regarded,  then,  as  one 


218  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

expression  among  others  of  energy  turned  to  practical 
ends;  as  one  evidence  among  others  of  his  preternatural 
activity.  For  Swift  lived  hard.  "There  is  no  such 
thing,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend,  "as  a  fine  old  gentleman;  if 
the  man  had  a  mind  or  body  worth  a  farthing  they  would 
have  worn  him  out  long  ago." 

This  need  of  exercise  shows  itself  not  only  in  his  serious 
preoccupation  with  the  life  of  his  time,  but  also  in  his 
gigantic  sense  of  play.  The  anecdotes  related 
of  him  by  his  earlier  biographers  are  legion, 
most  of  them  turning  upon  the  translation  of  some  whim 
into  practical  form,  usually  as  a  grotesque  joke.  The 
tale  of  his  dispersing  a  crowd  gathered  to  witness  an 
eclipse,  by  sending  a  message  that,  according  to  the 
Dean's  orders,  the  eclipse  would  be  put  off  for  a  day;  of 
his  impersonating  a  poor  usher  at  a  reception,  to  draw 
the  contempt  of  a  rich  fool;  and  of  his  disguising  himself 
as 'a  fiddler  at  a  beggar's  wedding,  to  discover  the  arts  by 
which  impostors  live — all  these  bear  testimony  to  that 
restlessness  which  could  not  be  satisfied  by  work  alone. 
With  this  lighter  side  of  Swift's  nature  are  to  be  con- 
nected the  works  by  which  he  is  chiefly  known — his  sat- 
ires A  Tale  of  a  Tub  and  Gulliver's  Travels. 

Once,  indeed,  this  love  of  a  practical  joke  was  directly 
responsible  for  some  of  Swift's  most  characteristic  writ- 
ing.    A  certain  Partridge  was  in  the  habit  of 
£he  issuing  an  almanac,  with  predictions  of  events 

Predictions,  to  fall  out  in  the  next  year.  This  impostor 
Swift  exposed  in  a  set  of  "Predictions  for  the 
year  1708,"  one  of  which  was  the  death  of  Partridge  him- 
self, who,  according  to  the  prophecy,  should  "infallibly 
die  upon  the  2Qth  of  March,  about  eleven  at  night,  of  a 
raging  fever.''  This  pamphlet  was  published  over  the 
name  Isaac  Bickerstaff.  On  the  3oth  of  March  Swift 
published  a  letter  supposed  to  be  written  by  a  revenue 
officer  to  a  certain  nobleman,  giving  an  account  of  Par- 


THE   REIGN   OF  CLASSICISM 


219 


tridge's  last  days  and  death.  He  also  wrote  "An  Elegy 
of  Mr.  Partridge."  Of  course  Partridge  hastened  in 
triumph  to  assure  the  world  that  he  was  not  dead;  but 
Swift  promptly  came  back  with  "A  Vindication  of  Isaac 
Bickerstaff,"  in  which,  after  rebuking  Partridge  for  his 
impudence,  he  proved  by  various  logical  demonstrations 
that  Partridge  certainly  died  "  within  half  an  hour  of  the 
time  foretold." 

This  skit  is  broadly  characteristic  of  the  whole  spirit 
and  method  of  Swift's  work,  in  that  it  exposes  a  sham  or 
an  evil  by  setting  up  a  more  monstrous  im- 
position against  it,  and  defends'  the  latter 
with  ironical  seriousness;  the  whole  being 
permeated  so  thoroughly  by  malicious  and  contemptuous 
fooling  that  one  hesitates  to  say  whether  it  may  or  may 
not  have  been  written  with  a  certain  amount  of  reform- 
ing zeal.  In  Swift's  works  generally  there  is  this  double 
aspect  of  earnestness  and  play.  In  "A  Modest  Pro- 
posal for  Preventing  the  Children  of  Poor  People  from 
being  a  Burden,"  the  terrible  suffering  in  Ireland  is  re- 
vealed in  the  mocking  suggestion  that  the  poor  should 
devote  themselves  to  rearing  children  to  be  killed  and 
eaten.  A  Tale  of  a  Tub,  with  its  bitter  reflections  upon 
the  spiritual  history  of  man  since  the  advent  of  Chris- 
tianity, is  on  its  face  the  story  of  three  stupid  brothers 
quarrelling  over  the  inheritance  of  their  father.  Gulli- 
ver's Travels  is,  in  form,  a  sort  of  Robinson  Crusoe,  yet  it 
is  full  of  satiric  intention. 

Gulliver  is  shipwrecked  first  at  Lilliput,  where  the  in- 
habitants   are    six    inches    tall— except    their    emperor, 
"taller  by  almost  the  breadth  of  my  nail  than 
any  of  his  court,  which  alone  is  enough  to       Travels?"8 
strike  an  awe  into  the  beholders."     Here  the 
satire  obviously  consists  in  showing  human  motives  at 
work  on  a  small  scale,  and  in  suggesting,  by  the  likeness 
of  the  Lilliputians  to  ourselves,  the  littleness  of  human 


220  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

affairs.  The  arts  by  which  the  officers  of  the  government 
keep  their  places,  such  as  cutting  capers  on  a  tight  rope 
for  the  entertainment  of  the  emperor,  remind  us  of  the 
quality  of  statesmanship  both  in  Swift's  day  and  our 
own;  the  dispute  over  the  question  at  which  end  an  egg 
should  properly  be  broken,  which  plunged  Lilliput  into 
civil  war,  is  a  comment  on  the  seriousness  of  party  divi- 
sions in  the  greater  world.  Gulliver's  next  voyage,  to 
Brobdingnag,  brings  him  to  a  people  as  large  in  compari- 
son with  man  as  the  Lilliputians  are  small.  Once  more 
his  adventures  are  a  tale  of  wonder,  behind  which  lurks 
Swift's  contempt  for  humanity.  Gulliver  tells  the  giant 
beings  by  whom  he  is  surrounded,  and  in  comparison 
with  whom  he  is  a  mere  manikin,  of  the  world  from 
which  he  has  come.  Among  other  things,  he  tells  of  the 
invention  of  gunpowder,  and  the  use  of  instruments  of 
warfare.  "The  king  was  struck  with  horror  at  the  de- 
scription I  had  given  of  those  terrible  engines.  He  was 
amazed  how  so  impotent  and  grovelling  an  insect  as  I 
(these  were  his  expressions)  could  entertain  such  inhuman 
ideas."  Finally,  after  a  third  voyage  to  Laputa  and 
other  curious  places,  Gulliver  makes  his  fourth  journey, 
to  the  land  of  the  Houyhnhnms,  where  horses  are  the 
self-conscious  rulers  and  masters,  and  where  the  human 
animal  is  in  a  state  of  servitude  and  degradation.  Here 
again  Gulliver  relates  to  his  incredulous  hosts  the  follies 
and  cruelties  of  men.  But  the  fiercest  satire  is  in  the 
picture  of  the  Yahoo,  the  human  beast,  in  which  the 
worst  of  man  is  once  for  all  told. 

This  double  point  of  view,  this  wavering  between  jest 
and  earnest,  is  not  only  superficially  characteristic  of 
Swift's  Swift's  writing;  it  seems  also  to  have  been 

Attitude          deeply  rooted  in  his  mental  constitution.     It 

Toward  His       js   amiost   as  if   he   CQuld   neyer   be   quite   gure 

that  the  world  was  worth  his  zeal;  as  if  he 
never  wished  to  compromise  himself  as  a  reformer,  or  to 


THE   REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  221 

cut  himself  off  from  the  possibility  of  falling  back  upon 
jest.  This  attitude  on  his  part  must  be  understood  in 
order  to  apprehend  his  relation  to  the  times  in  which  he 
lived.  As  has  been  said,  one  task  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury was  to  revise  and  enforce  standards  of  taste  and 
living.  Toward  this  task  Swift  took  two  opposite  posi- 
tions. In  his  contempt  for  man  he  could,  when  con- 
venient, defend  social  and  intellectual  conventions,  in 
the  belief  that  shams  and  delusions  were  restraints  neces- 
sary to  the  orderly  government  of  the  world;  that  they 
were,  so  to  speak,  wiles  by  which  the  intelligent  Houyhn- 
hnms  controlled  the  unspeakable  Yahoos  about  them. 
But  then  it  is  quite  open  to  him  to  turn  about  and  cry: 
"What  business  has  the  world  of  Yahoos  with  standards 
at  all?  Man  being  what  he  is,  decency  and  comeliness 
are  but  conventions."  And  he  proceeds  to  attack  them. 
He  takes  a  malicious  joy  in  shocking  persons  whose  char- 
acters are  founded  upon  mere  respectability.  To  this 
instinct  for  revolt  must  be  ascribed  the  obscenity  with 
which,  especially  in  his  poems,  Swift  insulted  the  grow- 
ing modesty  and  propriety  of  his  countrymen. 

It  is  the  thoroughness  of  Swift's  pessimism,  his  com- 
plete distrust  of  the  world,  that  gives  to  him  his  singu- 
larity and  peculiar  impressiveness  among 
English  writers.  It  would  be  fruitless  to  Distinction, 
deny  that  in  this  pessimism  there  is  some- 
thing stimulating,  something  awakening;  perhaps  because 
it  is  a  change  from  the  conventional  mode  in  which  we 
are  taught  to  look  at  the  world.  The  real  distinction  in 
his  view,  his  disregard  of  the  accepted,  the  trite,  the 
commonplace,  all  serve  to  startle  us  into  eager  attention. 
His  keenness  calls  for  answering  alertness  in  ourselves; 
his  suggestiveness  is  tonic;  even  his  coarseness  contains 
something  of  vigorous  criticism  that  will  not  let  us  rest 
in  conventional  opinions,  but  bids  us  prove  all  things  and 
call  everything  by  its  true  name. 


222  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

The  practical  spirit  which  Swift  brought  to  his  writing, 
his  intention  to  make  it  serve  a  turn  and  accomplish  a 
purpose,  is  reflected  in  his  style.  First  among 
his  merits  as  a  writer  is  his  clearness.  Fur- 
ther, his  contempt  for  all  kinds  of  sham  led  him  to  de- 
spise literary  affectation;  directness  and  simplicity  are, 
the  virtues  by  which  he  sets  most  store.  Indeed,  if  any- 
thing, his  style  is  too  severe,  too  sternly  practical,  too 
reserved,  too  dry.  It  represents  men  and  things  in  too 
hard  a  light,  with  too  sharp  an  outline,  without  the  soften- 
ing and  color  which  come  from  a  sympathetic  tempera- 
ment. Yet  with  all  this  practical  downrightness,  Swift's 
style  is  full  of  finesse.  A  more  subtle  instrument,  capa- 
ble of  more  delicate  persiflage,  of  more  elaborate  innu- 
endo, it  would  be  difficult  to  find.  So  little  obvious  are 
its  devices,  so  persistent  is  its  plainness,  that  we  cease 
to  suspect  it;  but  the  writer  neither  slumbers  nor  sleeps. 
Always  conscious  of  an  end  beyond  the  admitted  one, 
always  advancing  on  it  stroke  by  stroke,  he  surprises  us 
out  of  the  security  into  which  we  have  been  lulled,  and 
startles  us  into  keenness  and  nervousness  by  the  paradox 
which  lurked  all  the  while  behind  the  sober,  grave  ex- 
terior. Of  obvious  decoration,  such  as  balance,  rhythm, 
antithesis — the  half-poetic  qualities  of  earlier  prose — Swift 
has  little.  Indeed,  it  is  clear  that  the  nakedness  and 
simplicity  of  his  style  were  necessary  to  the  rapidity  and 
address  of  his  attack.  In  the  heavy  rhetorical  panoply 
of  Euphues  or  Jeremy  Taylor  he  would  have  been  as 
helpless  as  David  in  the  armor  of  Saul.  Absolute,  un- 
mitigated prose  he  wrote — the  quintessence  of  prose. 

The  bulk  of  Swift's  political  writing  appeared  in  pam- 
phlets, but  he  used  also  the  periodical  form;  he  conducted 

Periodical  a     Pa?er     ^    thC    T°ry    interest>     Called     The 

Literature.       Examiner,  to  which  Addison,  the  chief  liter- 
ary man  among  the  Whigs,  replied  in  the 
Whig  Examiner.     The  idea  of  the  periodical  appearance 


THE   REIGN   OF  CLASSICISM  223 

uf'a  party  organ  was  suggested  by  the  newspapers,  of 
which  the  first  had  appeared  in  1622,  Butter's  Weekly 
Newes  from  Italy  and  Germanic.  These  early  newspapers 
were  at  first  little  more  than  meagre  chronicles  of  events. 
Gradually  they  came  to  include  discussion  of  lighter  mat- 
ters, chiefly  in  the  form  of  answers  to  questions.  Defoe's 
Review  (see  page  275)  contained  a  separate  department 
called  "  Advice  from  the  Scandalous  Club,  being  a  weekly 
history  of  Nonsense,  Impertinence,  Vice,  and  Debauch- 
ery." That  province  of  journalism  which  lies  between 
news  and  politics  was  not  adequately  possessed,  however, 
until,  in  1709,  there  appeared  a  periodical  of  which  the 
object  was  to  "observe  upon  the  pleasurable  as  well  as 
the  busy  part  of  mankind."  This  was  The  Taller,  founded 
by  Richard  Steele  (1672-1729),  who  was  soon  joined 
?.u  the  enterprise  by  his  friend  Joseph  Addison  (1672- 
1719). 

The  Taller  appeared  three  times  a  week.  Each  number 
consisted  of  several  letters  dated  from  the  different  cof- 
foe-houses  of  London;  those  from  the  Saint  « ^g  Tllfler  •» 
James  being  devoted  to  foreign  and  domestic 
affairs,  those  from  Will's  to  poetry  and  the  drama,  those 
from  White's  to  "gallantry,  pleasure,  and  entertain- 
ment." There  were  also  papers  dated  "From  my  own 
apartment,"  which  dealt  with  miscellaneous  topics,  per- 
sonal or  social.  It  was  in  these  last  that  the  authors 
carried  out  most  fully  the  object  which  they  set  before 
themselves,  "to  expose  the  false  arts  of  life,  to  pull  off 
the  disguises  of  cunning,  vanity,  and  affectation,  and  to 
recommend  a  general  simplicity  in  our  dress,  our  dis- 
course, and  our  behavior."  Although  The  Taller  appealed 
to  the  public  without  distinction  of  party,  it  was  colored 
by  Steele's  Whig  views.  Accordingly,  when  the  authors 
wished  to  avoid  politics  altogether  they  abandoned  The 
Taller,  replacing  it  by  The  Spectator  (1711),  in  which 
Addison  took  the  chief  part. 


224  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Although  Addison  and  Steele  are  thus  remembered  for 

their  effort  to  lead  literature  away  from  politics,  both 

were  party  men.     Addison  first  attracted  no- 

joseph  tice  wniie  at  Oxford  by  a  Latin  poem  on  the 

Addison.  .*.  . 

Treaty  of  Ryswick;  in  recognition  of  this 
effort  he  received  a  pension  of  three  hundred  pounds  a 
year,  enabling  him  to  travel  abroad.  After  his  return 
the  Whigs  needed  a  poet  to  celebrate  the  Duke  of  Marl- 
borough's  victory  of  Blenheim,  and  the  commission  fell  to 
Addison.  His  poem  "The  Campaign"  gained  for  its  au- 
thor various  honors  and  preferments;  and  until  his  death 
in  1719  he  was  almost  constantly  in  office.  Indeed, 
Addison's  career  affords  the  best  example  of  the  high 
rewards  which  the  service  of  party  offered  in  the  early 
eighteenth  century  to  literary  men.  Even  his  tragedy, 
Cato,  which  was  presented  in  1713,  owed  its  great  popu- 
larity to  a  supposed  parallel  between  the  struggles  of  par- 
ties at  Rome  and  the  contemporary  political  situation  in 
England;  and  as  neither  party  could  allow  the  other  to 
take  to  itself  the  platitudes  about  liberty  with  which  the 
play  is  strewn,  Whigs  and  Tories  alike  attended  the  per- 
formances, vying  with  each  other  in  the  violence  of  their 
applause. 

No  character  in  English  letters  is  better  known  or  more 
generally  admired  than  Addison.  This  power  of  attract- 
Addison's  ing  admiration  is  largely  due  to  a  certain 
chapter.  classic  quality  which  showed  itself  in  his  lit- 
erary ideals,  in  his  pure,  regular  style,  in  the 
just  appreciation  of  his  criticism,  and  in  his  singularly 
correct  sense  of  conduct.  His  taste  was  nearly  faultless, 
and  taste  did  for  him  what  it  should  do  for  any  one;  it 
saved  him  from  blunders  and  follies.  In  his  life  as  in 
his  writing,  what  he  did  was  well  done.  Every  stroke 
that  went  to  the  presentation  of  his  character  in  bodily 
form  seems  to  have  been  laid  on  with  conscious  care  and 
conscious  pride.  The  last  touch  of  all,  as  he  lay  on  his 
death-bed,  and  turning  to  his  stepson  bade  him  "See 


THE  REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  225 

in  what  peace  a  Christian  can  die,"  expresses  the  mood 
in  which  his  whole  life  was  lived. 

This  mood  colored  most  of  Addison's  writing.  The 
papers  which  he  contributed  to  The  Taller,  The  Spectator, 
and  other  periodicals  are  for  the  most  part 
essays  in  the  art  of  living.  They  illustrate 
the  practical  nature  of  his  own  culture,  his  easy,  skilled 
mastery  of  life.  To  the  world  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
with  its  crudeness,  its  coarseness,  its  grotesqueness,  as 
revealed  in  the  drawings  of  Hogarth,  Addison  came  much 
as  Matthew  Arnold  came  to  the  later  nineteenth  century, 
with  its  materialism  and  its  trust  in  machinery.  Both 
v/ere  missionaries,  Addison  the  more  successful  because 
the  more  tactful.  His  task  too  was  simpler,  to  enforce 
ideals  of  civilization,  and  in  particular  to  overcome  the 
antisocial  tendencies  of  both  Puritan  and  Cavalier,  pre- 
serving the  zeal  for  conduct  of  the  former  without  his 
gloom  and  intolerance,  and  the  lightness  and  gayety  of 
the  latter  without  his  license.  Thus  we  find  many  of 
Addison's  papers  directed  against  the  coarser  vices  of  the 
time,  against  gambling,  drinking,  swearing,  indecency  of 
conversation,  cruelty,  practical  joking,  duelling.  Others 
attack  the  triviality  of  life,  special  follies  and  foibles  of 
dress,  of  manners,  or  of  thought;  others  the  lack  of  order 
and  comfort  in  the  life  of  the  community.  Addison  cared 
also  for  the  literary  cultivation  of  his  readers,  as  is  shown 
by  such  papers  as  the  famous  series  of  criticisms  on  Mil- 
ton. Finally,  he  made  a  novel  contribution  to  literature 
in  a  series  of  sketches  of  character  and  contemporary 
types— of  himself  as  the  Spectator,  of  Sir  Andrew  Free- 
port  the  merchant,  of  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley  the  country 
gentleman,  of  Will  Honeycomb  the  man  of  fashion. 
These  figures  typified  conveniently  the  interests  of  the 
public  to  which  The  Spectator  appealed;  but  more  than 
this  they  define  themselves  as  persons,  fitting  members  of 
the  great  company  of  characters  who  live  in  English  fie- 


226        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tion  from  Chaucer  to  George  Meredith.  One  of  them 
at  least.  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley,  to  whose  presentation 
both  Addison  and  Steele  contributed,  is  drawn  with  genu- 
ine affection,  as  an  embodiment  of  healthy,  kindly,  nat- 
ural virtue,  touched  with  just  enough  humor  to  make  the 
picture  convincing  and  wholly  winning. 

In  his  treatment  of  these  various  subjects  Addison  dis- 
plays the  graces  of  style  which  are  the  expression  of  his 
character.  He  has  perfect  confidence  in  his 
position,  and  in  his  style  sureness  goes  hand 
in  hand  with  absolute  lightness  of  touch.  His  sense  of 
humor  saves  him  from  putting  himself  on  the  defensive 
by  overemphasis.  Even  such  a  serious  subject  as  the 
separation  between  men  on  political  grounds,  he  treats 
by  a  playful  comparison  with  the  fashion  of  ladies  in 
wearing  plaster  patches  of  different  shapes  on  their  faces. 
This  easy  tone  comes  from  Addison's  moderation  and 
reasonableness,  and  from  his  genuine  good  nature.  Sat- 
irist though  he  is.  he  is  never  misanthropic.  The  differ- 
ence between  his  satire  and  Swift's  appears  in  the  contrast 
between  his  bantering  analysis  of  a  "Coquette's  Heart" 
and  Swift's  savage  ''Letter  to  a  Young  Lady." 

Technically.  Addison's  style  shows  how  rapidly  English 

prose    was   approaching   its   perfection.     For    the    more 

regular  virtues,   clearness,   facility,   grace,   it 

has  always  been  a  model.     Its  best  encomium 

was   pronounced   by   Doctor   Johnson   when    he  wrote: 

"Whoever  wishes  to  attain  an  English  style,  familiar  but 

not  coarse,  and  elegant  but  not  ostentatious,  must  give 

his  days  and  nights  to  the  volumes  of  Addison." 

Despite  the  close  connection  between  Addison  and 
Steele.  in  friendship,  political  interests,  and  literary  work, 
Ad  .  the  two  men  were  very  different.  Addison's 

stee?™  *        father  was  a  clergyman.     Addison  himself  in- 
tended  to   take  orders,   and   throughout  his 
life  showed  something  of  the  remoteness  and  coldness  of 


THE   REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  227 

clerical  culture.  "He  looked/'  as  a  contemporary  said 
with  some  scorn,  "like  a  parson  in  a  tie-wig."  Steele,  on 
the  contrary,  was  for  some  years  a  soldier,  and  never  lost 
the  bearing  of  his  profession.  He  was  Captain  Steele  and 
wore  a  sword  to  the  end  of  his  days. 

Steele's  life  was  a  miscellaneous  one,  filled  with  all 
sorts  of  ventures,  literary,  political,  and  commercial.  He 
left  Oxford  without  his  degree,  to  enlist  as  a 
soldier.  He  forsook  the  army  to  become  an  character 
active  pamphleteer  and  journalist  in  the  in- 
terest of  the  Whigs,  by  whom  he  was  given  various  gov- 
ernment positions.  He  was  elected  to  Parliament,  but 
was  expelled  from  the  House  for  writing  a  political  pam- 
phlet. He  wrote  several  plays,  and  was  for  a  time  di- 
rector of  Drury  Lane  Theatre.  Altogether  his  life  was  a 
thing  of  fragments.  His  character,  too,  showed  certain 
flaws  and  lapses,  faults  of  a  generous,  spontaneous  na- 
ture; and  to  these  his  writings  in  a  measure  served  to  call 
attention.  While  a  soldier  he  wrote  The  Christian  Hero, 
a  manual  of  personal  and  domestic  virtues;  his  plays  were 
a  bit  superfluously  moral;  in  The  Taller  he  appeared  as  a 
preacher.  This  discrepancy  between  his  personal  life  and 
the  tenor  of  much  of  his  writing  laid  Steele  open  to  gibe 
and  sneer;  but  there  is  an  honest  human  quality  about 
his  inconsistencies  that  gives  him,  after  all,  a  charm 
which  his  greater  contemporaries  lack.  Whether  as 
Christian  or  as  man  of  the  world,  Steele  was  always  him- 
self, and  if  he  did  not  erect  a  palatial  character  like  Addi- 
son's,  he  built  a  genial  dwelling-place  where  all  the  world 
wyas  welcome. 

The  inconsistency  in  Steele's  life  is  reflected  in  his 
style.  He  has  two  manners:  one  eminent,  gracious,  dig- 
nified, the  style  which  corresponds  to  his  ffis  gtyl^ 
moods  of  elevation  and  didacticism;  the  other 
careless,  flexible,  free,  like  his  ordinary  life.  This  second 
manner  is  best  seen  in  his  letters  to  his  wife,  which,  in 


228  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

their  delightful  frankness  and  their  abandonment  to  the 
feeling  of  the  moment,  show  him  in  his  most  attractive 
aspect.  They  prove  that  the  lightness  and  ease  which 
mark  The  Taller  and  The  Spectator,  qualities  which  in 
Addison  were  the  fruit  of  cultivation,  were  entirely  native 
to  Steele. 

Addison  and  Steele  were  moralists,  and  their  doctrine 

is  in  a  high  degree  characteristic  of  their  time.     It  deals 

with  the  material  and  superficial  aspects  of 

^rd  living;  it  represents  the  effort  of  literature  to 

Chesternelu.  .  .  ,  .  , 

support  the  conventions  in  accordance  witn 
which  life  was  ordering  itself.  This  attitude,  however 
wholesome  and  necessary,  involved  a  tendency  to  set  an 
excessive  value  on  outward  behavior  as  distinct  from 
character,  a  tendency  which  becomes  more  marked  in  a 
writer  of  somewhat  later  date,  Lord  Chesterfield  (1694- 
1773).  The  principles  of  good  form,  for  which  Chester- 
field's name  is  a  byword,  he  expounds  fully  in  his  Letters 
to  His  Son,  which  set  forth  a  system  of  conduct  based 
frankly  upon  scepticism  as  to  the  reality  of  morals.  His- 
torically Chesterfield  represents  the  extreme  swing  of  the 
pendulum  that  was  set  in  motion  by  Steele  and  Addison. 
With  him  the  decorum  and  urbanity  inculcated  by  The 
Spectator  have  become  the  major  ends  of  life,  the  chief 
business  of  a  gentleman.  Chesterfield  typifies  one  phase 
of  the  rather  shallow  positivism  of  the  century,  its  re- 
fusal to  go  behind  what  appealed  immediately  to  the 
senses,  to  believe  in  what  it  could  not  see.  Politeness 
can  be  seen,  felt,  valued;  hence  it  is  real.  Goodness  of 
heart,  virtue,  may  exist  or  not;  we  cannot  be  sure;  they 
are  so  easy  to  simulate,  so  hard  to  test,  that  the  wise 
man  prefers  to  put  no  trust  in  them,  and  confines  his  in- 
terest to  deportment.  Such  is  Chesterfield's  view. 

There  is  no  sharp  dividing  line  between  the  prose 
writers  and  the  poets  of  the  early  eighteenth  century. 
The  practical  spirit  of  the  age,  which  limited  the  realm 


THE   REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  2  29 

of  art  to  the  interests  of  actual  life,  made  the  material  of 
prose  and  poetry  much  the  same;  and  owing  to  the  char- 
acter of  couplet  verse,  the  typical  virtues  of 
poetry  were  not  very  different  from  those  of 
prose.  Of  the  writers  already  discussed,  Swift 
and  Addison  were  poets  as  well  as  prose  men.  The  great- 
est poet  of  the  period,  however,  the  direct  continuator  of 
the  tradition  of  Dryden,  and  the  most  brilliant  man  of  let- 
ters of  the  early  part  of  the  century,  was  Alexander  Pope. 
Pope  was  born  in  1688  of  Catholic  parents.  By  reason 
of  the  sweeping  laws  against  the  entrance  of  Catholics 
into  public  service,  he  was  shut  out  from  the 
ordinary  career  of  Englishmen  in  Parliament,  p10epxeander 
the  church,  or  the  army.  In  consequence  he 
was  among  his  contemporaries  almost  the  sole  example 
of  an  author  who  was  entirely  a  man  of  letters;  the  events 
of  his  life  are  altogether  literary  events.  He  began  his 
career  early.  His  Pastorals,  written  when  he  was  seven- 
teen, were  published  in  1709.  The  Essay  on  Criticism  two 
years  later  attracted  Addison's  notice;  and  Pope's  other 
early  poems,  "Windsor  Forest,"  "Eloisa  to  Abelard," 
and  above  all  The  Rape  of  the  Lock,  of  which  the  first  draft 
appeared  in  1712,  added  to  his  reputation.  About  1713 
he  undertook  the  greatest  venture  of  his  life,  the  transla- 
tion of  Homer,  which  he  did  not  complete  until  1725. 
One  important  effect  of  the  translation,  on  Pope's  own 
career  and  on  the  literature  of  the  time,  is  to  be  noted. 
From  the  publishers  and  from  his  sales  to  subscribers 
Pope  obtained  more  than  five  thousand  pounds  for  the 
Iliad,  and  two-thirds  of  this  sum  for  the  Odyssey  (on 
which  most  of  the  work  was  done  by  others) — much  the 
greatest  pecuniary  reward  which  up  to  that  time  had 
been  received  by  any  English  author.  It  made  Pope  in- 
dependent of  patronage  and  politics,  and  it  marks  the 
opening  of  a  new  era  in  the  social  status  of  authors,  one 
in  which  they  looked  to  the  public  alone  for  support. 


230  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  profits   of  his   translation  enabled  Pope  to  buy 

a   small   estate   at   Twickenham,    on   the   Thames   near 

London.     This  he  fitted  up  in  the  artificial 

Se1^"  st>'le  which  the  age  affected  in  other  things 
besides  literature.  He  subdued  nature  to 
taste  by  landscape-gardening;  scattered  statuary  and 
temples  about  in  artistic  contrast  to  the  woods  and  lawns; 
and  as  his  crowning  achievement  he  built  his  famous 
grotto,  ornamented  with  mirrors.  At  Twickenham  Pope 
lived  the  remainder  of  his  life,  secluded  from  the  cares 
and  struggles  of  the  world,  but  very  constantly  occupied 
with  his  own  relations  to  it.  Here  he  entertained  his 
friends.  Swift.  Arbuthnot,  Gay.  and  others,  with  whom 
he  formed  a  literary  partnership  known  as  the  Scriblerus 
Club.  It  was  in  connection  with  this  partnership  that  he 
published,  in  1728,  a  great  onslaught  on  their  literary  foes, 
entitled  The  Dunciad.  At  Twickenham  also  Pope  saw 
much  of  Bolingbroke.  and  under  his  influence  wrote  the 
Essay  on  Man,  published  in  1732  and  1734.  The  re- 
mainder of  his  work  consists  of  the  Moral  Epistles  (satires 
in  imitation  of  Horace),  the  "Epistle  to  Doctor  Arbuth- 
not," which  is  Pope's  chief  defense  of  himself,  and  the 
''Epilogue  to  the  Satires."  These  were  published  before 
1737,  after  which  date  Pope  wrote  little.  He  died  in 
1744. 

Pope's  claim  to  the  first  place  among  the  poets  of  his 
time  cannot  be  gainsaid,  but  his  true  place  among  the 
poets  of  all  time  is  a  matter  of  dispute.  At 
Limitations.  ^  outset  it  must  be  recognized  that  certain 
sources  of  power  were  denied  him,  partly  in 
consequence  of  the  nature  of  the  period  in  which  he  lived, 
partly  by  reason  of  the  deficiencies  of  his  own  tempera- 
ment. The  age  was  one  in  which  sympathy  with  nature 
and  with  humanity  was  limited,  and  in  this  matter  Pope 
shared  the  blindness  of  his  age.  Moreover,  Pope  was 
from  birth  sickly  and  feeble;  his  bodily  ailments  checked 


THE   REIGN    OF   CLASSICISM  231 

the  growth  of  his  character.  Accordingly,  we  miss  in  his 
poetry  greatness  of  feeling  for  the  natural  world  and  for 
the  world  of  man,  as  well  as  greatness  of  human  person- 
ality. That  such  a  man  should  become  a  poet  at  all  is 
as  wonderful  as  that  a  deaf  man  should  be  a  composer, 
or  a  blind  man  a  sculptor.  That  he  should  be  the  typical 
poet  of  his  age  shows  how  limited  was  the  conception 
which  then  prevailed  of  the  nature  and  function  of  poetry. 

But  though  certain  qualities  which  we  expect  to  find 
in  poetry  are  necessarily  absent  in  Pope,  these  were  re- 
placed, at  least  for  his  contemporaries,  by 
others.  First  of  all,  he  owed  his  success  to 
his  marvellous  skill  in  handling  the  heroic 
couplet.  He  declares  that  as  a  child  he  "lisped  in  num- 
bers, for  the  numbers  came."  But  he  was  not  satisfied 
with  precocious  amateurism.  One  of  his  earliest  friends 
and  critics,  William  Walsh,  pointed  out  to  him  that 
"though  we  had  had  several  great  poets,  we  never  had 
any  one  great  poet  that  was  correct."  Correctness, 
accordingly.  Pope  made  his  aim  from  the  first.  Correct- 
ness requires  patience,  and  genius  for  taking  pains  Pope 
had  in  abundance.  Nor  did  he  sacrifice  to  mere  exact- 
ness of  metre  and  rhyme  the  other  virtues  of  couplet 
verse,  compression,  epigrammatic  force,  and  brilliancy  of 
diction.  Still,  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that,  in  the 
long  process  of  polishing  and  revising  to  suit  a  standard 
of  extreme  nicety,  he  lost  something  of  the  spontaneity 
of  his  first  attempts. 

The  importance  of  technical  qualities  in  the  eyes  of 
Pope's  public  is  attested  by  the  success  of  the  Essay  on 
Criticism,  in  which  he  set  forth  the  artistic 
principles  of  the  time  with  special  reference 
to  poetry.     In  this  discussion  he  expresses  the     cism." 
chief  canon  of  the  age  in  the  direction  to  fol- 
low  nature,  but   nature   methodized   by   rules,   for  "to 
copy  nature  is  to  copy  them."     The  substance  of  the 


232  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

poem  is  made  up  of  commonplaces,  for  Pope  and  his 
readers  believed  that  there  was  nothing  new  under  the 
sun;  but  these  commonplaces  are  given  the  most  apt,  the 
most  chiselled  form,  a  form  in  which  they  are  fitted  to 
survive  as  part  of  the  common  wisdom  of  the  race. 

Pope's  comprehension  of  the  artistic  demands  of  his 

time,  and  his  rhetorical  skill,  fitted  him  admirably  for 

the  work  which  took  up  most  of  the  middle 

Homi  years   of  nis   life'    tnat   of   translation-     He 

translated  from  Ovid,  Horace,  and  Statius; 
and  he  modernized  Chaucer  and  Donne.  But  the  most 
notable  of  all  his  attempts  in  this  direction  is  his  transla- 
tion of  Homer.  The  attitude  of  the  eighteenth  century 
toward  the  greatest  of  the  classics  is  shown  by  a  line  in 
the  Essay  on  Criticism,  which  declares  that  Homer  and 
nature  are  the  same,  the  highest  object  of  study  and  imi- 
tation. Pope's  own  knowledge  of  Homer  was  second- 
hand and  inaccurate;  he  was  an  indifferent  Greek  scholar, 
and  was  forced  to  depend  on  Latin  and  English  transla- 
tions. But  the  impossibility  of  his  making  a  literally 
faithful  translation  left  him  the  freer  to  turn  the  material 
of  the  Greek  poems  into  the  form  in  which  it  was  most 
fitted  to  become  a  part  of  the  culture  of  his  own  time. 
Not  only  does  Homer,  in  Pope's  hands,  become  an  eight- 
eenth-century poet,  by  virtue  of  his  submission  to  the 
literary  fashions  of  the  day — the  heroic  couplet,  and 
conventional  poetic  diction — but  even  the  characters,  the 
manners,  the  ethical  ideals  of  primitive  Greece  are  run 
over  into  eighteenth-century  moulds.  Just  as  to  the 
cloudy  mediaeval  imagination  the  heroes  of  Troy  became 
knights,  so  to  Pope's  more  enlightened  understanding 
they  are  statesmen  and  party  leaders,  treating  each  other 
with  parliamentary  courtesy,  and  talking  of  virtue,  pa- 
triotism, and  fame  as  glibly  and  eloquently  as  Boling- 
broke  himself.  In  the  loftier  parts  of  Homer's  poetry 
Pope's  style  has  a  certain  appropriateness.  It  is  in  the 


THE  REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  .  233 

level  passages  of  narrative  and  description,  where  the 
simple  material  will  not  take  the  polish  of  brilliant  dic- 
tion and  epigram,  that  Pope  falls  lamentably  short  of 
his  original.  Yet  with  all  deductions,  his  Homer  is  an 
amazing  performance,  perhaps  the  most  complete  trans- 
lation, or  rather  adaptation,  in  existence;  a  tour  de  force 
made  possible  by  the  definiteness  and  precision  of  eight- 
eenth-century art,  and  by  the  confidence  of  the  age  in 
its  own  ideals. 

The  works  of  Pope  thus  far  mentioned  are  chiefly  re- 
markable for  their  literary  qualities;  they  show  him  as 
the  master  of  his  form.  But  even  more  im- 
portant is  the  group  of  poems  in  which,  with 
no  loss  of  artistic  finish,  he  dealt  directly 
with  the  life  of  his  time.  Of  these  The  Rape  of  the  Lock 
stands  first.  The  poem  was  suggested  by  a  trivial  occur- 
rence, the  rude  behavior  of  Lord  Petre  in  cutting  a  lock 
from  the  head  of  Miss  Fermor.  Only  the  excessive  in- 
terest of  the  age  in  social  matters,  combined  with  the 
sympathetic  genius  of  a  poet,  could  have  made  such 
gossip  as  this  outlast  the  centuries.  Pope  wrote  first  a 
rapid  account  of  the  card-party  at  Hampton  at  which 
the  theft  took  place.  Later  he  expanded  the  poem  by 
introducing  the  sylphs  who  guard  the  lady's  bed,  make 
her  toilet,  and  attend  her  in  public — admirable  sugges- 
tions of  the  artifice  which  directed  each  act,  however 
trivial,  of  a  belle  of  Queen  Anne's  day.  The  Rape  of  the 
Lock  is  not  only  a  satire  on  society,  it  is  a  witty  parody 
of  the  heroic  style  in  poetry.  Even  the  verse  form  is 
treated  humorously,  especially  through  its  tendency 
toward  anticlimax,  as  in  the  lines 

Here  thou,  great  Anna !  whom  three  realms  obey, 
Dost  sometimes  counsel  take— and  sometimes  tea. 

In  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  the  satire  is  general,  and,  on 
the  whole,  good-natured.     Many  of  Pope's  poems,  how- 


234  -     A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ever,  are  intensely  personal,  and  grew  out  of  the  circum- 
stances of  his  life.     As  has  been  said  already,  his  char- 
acter was  not  a  great  one.     We  listen  in  vain 
£?pe\  in  his  poetry  for  the  deeper  notes  of  individual 

Character.  •>   m  -rvi-ii         ri_ 

human  experience.  But  his  lack  of  absorp- 
tion in  his  inner  life  made  him  morbidly  sensitive  in  his 
superficial  contact  with  the  world.  His  biography  is 
largely  a  record  of  his  personal  relations  with  Wycherley, 
with  Swift,  with  Addison,  with  Arbuthnot,  and  with 
Bolingbroke;  and  of  his  literary  enmities  with  men  too 
numerous  and  generally  too  obscure  for  mention.  Two 
of  his  old  friends,  Wycherley  and  Swift,  when  both  were 
mentally  incapable,  he  tricked  by  putting  out  garbled 
versions  of  his  correspondence  with  them.  The  story  of 
his  method  of  getting  these  letters  before  the  public 
without  appearing  to  be  responsible  for  the  publication  is 
characteristic  of  his  petty  dishonesty,  but  still  more  of 
the  attention  which  he  paid  to  the  surface  of  his  life,  and 
the  care  which  he  expended  in  preparing  it  for  the  public 
view. 

Toward  the  close  of  Pope's  life  his  personal  interests 
formed  more  and  more  the  chief  motive  of  his  poetry. 

The  Moral  Epistles,  though  written  ostensibly 
sltire^  on  general  themes  like  "The  Use  of  Riches," 

are  crowded  with  particular  allusions;  and  the 
"Imitations  of  Horace"  are  likewise  made  up  of  personal 
contemporary  sketches.  The  "Epistle  to  Arbuthnot" 
contains  Pope's  revenge  for  Addison's  support  of  a  rival 
translation  of  Homer,  the  venomous  lines  in  which  Addi- 
son is  described  as  Atticus.  His  own  literary  ventures 
and  his  alliance  with  Swift,  Gay,  and  others,  brought 
him  into  collision  with  critics  like  John  Dennis,  with 
Theobald,  a  rival  editor  of  Shakespeare,  with  Bentley, 
who  as  a  Greek  scholar  spoke  disrespectfully  of  Pope's 
Homer.  These  and  countless  other  literary  and  personal 
grudges  Pope  paid  off  by  the  several  publications  of  The 


THE  REIGN   OF   CLASSICISM  235 

Dunciad,  an  elaborate  satire  in  which,  after  the  fashion 
of  Dryden  in  MacFlecknoe,  the  dullards,  pedants,  and 
bad  poets  are  presented  in  ridiculous  surroundings  and 
attitudes.  It  should  be  remembered,  however,  that 
Pope,  like  Sir  Philip  Sidney  before  him,  represented  an 
aristocratic  tradition  in  literature,  part  of  which  w'as  the 
defense  of  poetry  against  those  who  through  lack  of  skill 
or  for  mercenary  reasons  would  do  it  wrong. 

One  of  Pope's  last  friendships,  that  with  Bolingbroke, 
proved  the  inspiration  of  the  best  remembered  of  his 
poems,  the  Essay  on  Man.  Bolingbroke  was 
the  representative  of  a  philosophy,  thoroughly  ^ 
characteristic  of  eighteenth-century  thought, 
to  which  the  name  Deism  has  been  given.  Deism  was 
an  effort  to  substitute  natural  for  revealed  religion.  In- 
deed, Pope's  " Essay"  is  rationalistic  in  that  it  finds  sat- 
isfactory grounds  for  belief  in  God  by  the  exercise  of 
reason,  unaided  by  revelation.  The  poem  is  in  reality  an 
application  of  common  sense  to  the  problems  of  the  uni- 
verse and  to  the  life  of  man;  and  where  common  sense 
refuses  to  carry  us,  "beyond  the  flaming  ramparts  of  the 
world,"  there  Pope  limits  his  inquiry.  The  first  epistle 
is  concerned  with  man's  place  in  nature;  the  second  with 
individual  ethics;  the  third  with  the  origin  of  society  and 
politics;  the  fourth  with  the  question  of  man's  happiness. 
In  all  four  appear  the  rationalism  of  the  century,  its  sat- 
isfaction with  things  as  they  are,  its  dislike  of  those  spec- 
ulative differences  which  lead  to  fanaticism,  its  trust  in 
downright  utility.  In  short,  the  Essay  on  Man  is  a 
marvellous  collection  of  aphorisms,  pointing  neatly  and 
exactly  the  peculiarities  and  prejudices  of  the  age  of 
which  Pope  was  so  eminently  the  voice. 

Pope   was   by  personal   inclination   connected   chiefly 
with  the  writers  who  gathered  about  Swift,  and        Jofan  Qay 
in  Swift's  absence  in  Ireland  he  was  the  cen- 
tre of  the  group.     His  satellite  of  chief  magnitude  was 


236  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

John  Gay  (1685-1732).  Gay,  unlike  his  greater  friends, 
was  a  thoroughly  good-natured,  likable  man,  whose  bent 
was  toward  broad,  genial  humor  rather  than  bitter  satire. 
His  earliest  important  poem,  The  Shepherd's  Week  (1714), 
was  a  burlesque  treatment  of  the  conventions  of  pastoral 
poetry.  In  Trivia  (1714)  he  transferred  his  talent  for 
humorous  observation  to  the  London  streets,  and  this 
and  the  Fables  (1727)  show  his  happy  faculty  for  easy 
comment  and  criticism  of  life.  His  fame  in  his  own  day 
rested  perhaps  chiefly  upon  The  Beggar's  Opera  (1728), 
another  burlesque,  but  he  is  remembered  now  for  a  lyrical 
gift,  which  produced  the  two  famous  songs,  "  'Twas  when 
the  seas  were  roaring"  and  "Black-eyed  Susan." 


CHAPTER   XI 

THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY:  BEGINNINGS  OF  ROMANTICISM 


THE  death  of  Pope  in  1744  is  conventionally  regarded 
as  marking  the  end  of  the  period  during  which  the  classi- 
cal ideal  was  dominant  in  literature.  This 
ideal  was  now  to  give  way  gradually  to  what  ^ovf^^tic 
is  called  the  Romantic  Movement.  Roman- 
ticism has  already  been  referred  to  in  connection  with 
the  Renaissance.  It  is  essentially  the  emphasis  upon  the 
individual  effort  to  escape  from  the  world  of  conventions 
and  social  control.  There  are  two  great  avenues  of  such 
escape — external  nature  and  the  imagination.  The  former 
appeared  in  contrast  to  the  prevailing  admiration  of  ur- 
ban life;  the  latter  led  men's  thoughts  into  the  past,  and 
to  remote  lands.  Indeed,  medievalism  became  associated 
with  the  Romantic  Movement  somewhat  as  classicism 
with  the  Renaissance,  because  it  provided  writers  with 
material  and  forms  suitable  to  their  mood.  But  roman- 
ticism looked  toward  the  future  also;  in  its  reverence  for 
the  individual  for  himself,  apart  from  his  social  position, 
it  fostered  sympathy  for  the  oppressed,  applauded  resis- 
tance to  institutions  hostile  to  human  rights,  and  looked 
forward  to  a  new  social  system,  a  Utopia.  It  thus  con- 
nected itself  with  the  revolutionary  tendency  that  mani- 
fested itself  at  the  close  of  the  century.  It  must  not  be 
thought  that  romanticism  and  classicism  are  mutually 
exclusive  elements.  Both  impulses  are  present  in  every 
age.  But  while  the  classical  movement  was  gaining 
237 


238  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

strength  throughout  the  seventeenth  century  and  became 
quite  dominant  after  1660,  the  romantic  tendency  began 
to  gather  force  early  in  the  eighteenth  century  and  came 
to  full  triumph  early  in  the  nineteenth. 

Even  before  Pope's  death  there  were  signs  of  reaction 
against  the  pseudoclassicism  which  he  so  perfectly  typi- 
fied.    His   success   with    the   heroic    couplet 
Early  moved  younger   poets    to   try   other    forms. 

Romantic  6    .     * 

Tendencies,  and  in  increasing  number  they  returned  to 
the  great  poems  of  his  predecessors,  Milton 
and  Spenser,  in  blank  verse  and  the  Spenserian  stanza. 
Moreover,  his  comparative  neglect  of  nature  and  human 
passion  may  have  been  a  cause  why  men  of  originality 
should  have  entered  these  fields.  At  first  this  play  of 
emotion  manifested  itself  in  a  return  to  the  great  theme 
which  had  inspired  so  much  of  seventeenth-century  poetry 
and  prose — death.  The  number  of  poems  of  the  char- 
acter of  Thomas  Parnell's  "Night  Piece  on  Death,"  and 
Robert  Blair's  "The  Grave"  gave  rise  to  the  term 
"graveyard  poetry"  to  designate  the  school.  The  ear- 
liest poets  to  exemplify  romanticism  broadly,  however, 
made  use  of  the  two  avenues  above  mentioned — nature 
and  the  past. 

The  first  of  this  group  of  poets,  James  Thomson  (1700- 
1748),  was  a  Scotchman,  who  came  up  to  London  in 
1725.  The  following  year  he  published  a 
section,  "Winter,"  of  a  poem  which  he  after- 
ward continued  under  the  titles  "Summer," 
"Spring,"  and  "Autumn,"  and  which  was  published  in 
1730  as  The  Seasons.  To  a  reader  of  to-day,  accustomed 
to  a  far  deeper  and  subtler  appreciation  of  nature  than 
Thomson  was  capable  of,  this  poem  seems  a  rather  hum- 
drum chronicling  of  the  sights,  experiences,  and  thoughts 
connected  with  the  changes  of  the  year;  and  the  moral 
digressions,  the  compliments  to  patrons,  the  pseudo- 
classic  personifications,  and  the  frequently  stilted  rhetoric, 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  239 

tend  to  obscure  the  real  freshness  and  truth  of  Thomson's 
observation.  But  to  the  readers  of  his  own  day  the 
novelty  was  great.  For  two  generations  the 
first-hand  study  of  nature  had  been  neglected.  Thomson's 
Literature  had  found  its  interests  in  urban  life;  Nature- 
or,  if  it  ventured  into  the  country  at  all,  it 
was  into  the  conventional,  unreal  country  of  the  pastoral 
tradition.  The  Augustan  age  cared  more  for  a  formal 
garden  in  the  Dutch  or  Italian  style  than  for  the  sub- 
limest  natural  landscape  in  the  world;  and  when,  by 
the  necessity  of  their  subject,  Augustan  authors  had 
touched  upon  ordinary  natural  phenomena,  they  had 
striven  to  conceal  the  rudeness  of  their  theme  by  vague 
and  elegant  circumlocution.  Accordingly,  Thomson's 
poem  had  an  aspect  of  daring  innovation.  His  views 
of  English  landscape,  now  panoramic  and  now  detailed, 
his  description  of  the  first  spring  showers,  of  the  sum- 
mer thunder-storms,  and  of  the  terrors  of  the  wintry 
night,  showed  an  honest  understanding  and  love  of  that 
to  which  the  eye  had  long  been  blind.  In  the  Hymn 
with  which  The  Seasons  concludes,  a  higher  mood  ap- 
pears— a  mood  of  religious  ecstasy  in  the  presence  of 
nature,  prophetic  of  Wordsworth,  by  whom,  indeed, 
Thomson  was  highly  valued: 

Ye  forests  bend,  ye  harvests  wave,  to  Him; 
Breathe  your  still  song  into  the  reaper's  heart 
As  home  he  goes  beneath  the  joyous  moon. 

The  Seasons  is  in  blank  verse.     In  The  Castle  of  Indo- 
lence, published  in  1748,  Thomson  adopted  the  Spenserian 
stanza.     His   allegiance   to   Spenser  is  more 
than    formal.     He    succeeds    in    recapturing   ^  In^0_as 
much  of  the  master's  rich,  long-drawn  music;    JjJJJJ^1*8 
and  he  steeps  his  allegory  in  the  Spenserian    c°lor 
atmosphere  of  mirage-like  splendor.     The  em- 
bowered castle  of  the  enchanter  Indolence  and  his  cap- 


240  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tives,  the  "land  of  drowsy-head/'  with  its  "listless  cli- 
mate," where  the  plaint  of  stock-doves  mingles  with  the 
sighing  of  the  hillside  pines  and  with  the  murmur  of  the 
distant  sea,  are  described  with  an  art  which  made  The 
Castle  of  Indolence  a  fruitful  influence  in  romantic  verse, 
even  as  late  as  Keats. 

As  Thomson  exemplifies   the  Spenserian   influence  at 

work  in  the  eighteenth  century,  Collins,  Young,  and  Gray 

mark    that   of   Milton.     Young   reverted   to 

s£nsereand     Milton's    blank    verse;    Collins    and    Gray 

Milton  on        abound  in  echoes,  and  indeed  in  literal  bor- 


rowmgs>  from  Milton's  earlier  lyrical  work. 
To  Milton's  example  in  "L'Allegro"  and  "II 
Penseroso"  is.perhaps  due  the  fact  that  both  these  poets, 
after  they  had  freed  themselves  from  the  other  machinery 
of  pseudoclassic  verse,  persisted  in  the  use  of  those  life- 
less personifications  —  "wan  Despair,"  "brown  Exercise," 
"Music,  sphere-descended  Maid"  —  in  which  the  Augustan 
age  delighted. 

William  Collins  (1721-1759)  was  a  delicate,  nervously 
irresolute  spirit,  who  lived  his  life  under  the  shadow  of  a 
constitutional  despondency  which  deepened 
at  last  mto  insanity.  He  was  an  ardent  dis- 
ciple of  Thomson's,  and  when  he  came  up  to 
London,  he  settled  near  Thomson's  house  in  Kew  Lane, 
where  the  elder  poet  was  illustrating  his  romantic  ten- 
dencies by  writing  verse  in  the  moonlight,  while  listening 
to  the  nightingales  in  Richmond  Gardens.  In  1747  Col- 
lins published  a  slender  volume  of  Odes,  in  which  we  can 
trace,  more  surely  than  in  Thomson's  work,  the  recovery 
of  the  greater  qualities  of  poetry.  The  exquisite  "Ode 
to  Evening"  shows  a  sympathy  with  nature,  and  an  ob- 
servation of  her  aspects,  subtler  and  more  suggestive 
than  that  displayed  in  Tiie  Seasons.  The  ode  is  un- 
rhymed,  and  has  a  low,  meditative  twilight  music.  The 
famous  "Ode  on  the  Passions"  is,  on  the  contrary*,  very 


BEGINNINGS   OF  ROMANTICISM  241 

rich  and  elaborate  in  its  metrical  form,  and  it  illustrates 
the  influence  upon  Collins  of  Milton's  lyrical  art.  The 
Passions  here  are  shadowy  personifications,  and  the  effect 
of  the  whole  poem  is  rather  cold,  but  it  shows  clearly  that 
the  technical  secrets  of  great  lyrical  poetry  were  begin- 
ning to  be  rediscovered. 

Another  ode  of  Collins's,  "On  the  Popular  Supersti- 
tions of  the  Highlands"  (1749),  is  one  of  the  most  inter- 
esting landmarks  in  the  history  of  the  roman- 
tic revival.  The  purpose  of  the  poem  is  to 
recommend  the  native  folk-lore  of  Scotland  Supersti- 
as  poetic  material.  Collins  lets  his  fancy  play 
over  the  folk-myths  of  water-witch,  pygmy,  and  will-o'- 
the-wisp,  and  over  all  the  creatures  of  that  fairy  world 
so  real  to  the  mediaeval  mind.  With  kindling  imagina- 
tion he  describes  the  wild  Northern  islands,  whose  inhab- 
itants subsist  on  birds'  eggs  found  among  the  sea-cliffs, 
where  the  bee  is  never  heard  to  murmur;  and  he  trans- 
ports us  to  that  mysterious  region,  where  "beneath  the 
showery  West"  the  buried  Kings  stalk  forth  at  midnight 

In  pageant  robes  and  wreathed  in  sheeny  gold, 
And  on  their  twilight  tombs  aerial  council  hold. 

Here  we  see  several  of  the  leading  traits  of  romanticism; 
interest  in  the  mysterious  and  supernatural,  in  strange 
and  remote  conditions  of  human  life,  and  in  the  Middle 
Ages  as  they  appeared  in  vague  chiaroscuro  through  a 
veil  of  dream. 

Collins's  constitutional  melancholy  found  little  expres- 
sion in  his  verse;  it  appears  only  as  a  kind  of  romantic 
sensibility  penetrating  his  best  lyrics,  such 
as  the  "Dirge  in  Cymbeline"  and  "How 
Sleep  the  Brave,"  and  casting  here  and  there  Thoughts." 
a  faint  flush  of  warmth  over  his  odes.  The 
funereal  broodings  and  romantic  despair,  characteristic 
of  the  new  movement,  found  their  most  striking  expres- 


242  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sion  in  the  Night  Thoughts  of  Edward  Young  (1681-1765), 
published  in  1742-1744,  when  the  author  was  over  sixty. 
The  Night  Thoughts  are  a  series  of  reflections  upon  the 
brevity  and  tragic  uncertainties  of  life,  leading  to  a  view 
of  religion  as  man's  consoler.  The  poet  dwells,  some- 
times with  tragic  force  and  gloomy  magnificence  of 
phrase,  oftener  with  a  hollow  and  pompous  rhetoric, 
upon  the  solitude  of  the  tomb,  and  the  grim  circumstances 
of  death.  In  the  same  year  in  which  the  Night  Thoughts 
were  begun,  a  far  greater  poet,  Thomas  Gray,  began  his 
famous  " Elegy  in  a  Country  Churchyard,"  in  which  is 
revealed  the  same  sombre  view  of  man's  life  and  des- 
tiny, though  softened  and  broadened  and  humanized 
in  a  way  to  make  the  poem  not  only  a  perfect  work 
of  art,  but  a  permanent  expression  of  the  mood  it  em- 
bodies. 

Thomas  Gray  (1716-1771)  lived  the  life  of  a  scholar 
and  recluse  at  Cambridge,  where  in  his  later  years  he  held 
a  professorship  of  history,  but  delivered  no 
Gra™aS  lectures.  The  range  of  his  intellectual  in- 
terests, as  shown  by  his  letters,  journals,  and 
prose  remains,  was  immense,  including,  besides  ancient 
and  modern  literature,  music,  painting,  architecture,  and 
natural  science.  He  was  sensitive  to  all  the  finer  influ- 
ences of  the  time;  and  his  development  furnishes  a  kind 
of  index  to  the  spiritual  forces  at  work,  many  years  be- 
fore they  found  a  general  outlet. 

Gray's  poetry,  the  bulk  of  which  is  very  small,  falls 
into  three  periods.  His  early  odes,  written  about  1742,  of 
His  First  wm'cn  tne  best  known  are  those  "On  Spring" 
Period!8  and  "  On  a  Distant  Prospect  of  Eton  College," 
have  much  of  the  moralizing  tone  of  Queen 
Anne  poetry;  though  in  their  metrical  form,  in  their  sym- 
pathy with  nature,  and  in  their  vague  dejection,  they 
show  the  romantic  leaven  at  work.  Gray's  second  period 
(I7SO-I757)  includes  the  "Elegy  in  a  Country  Church- 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  243 

yard,"1  and  his  two  most  ambitious  odes,  "The  Progress 
of  Poesy"  and  "The  Bard."  The  Elegy,  perhaps  the 
most  widely  known  and  loved  of  English 

•     .LI       n         ±  a  c  j.i    .1    «i<  His  Second 

poems,  is  the  finest  flower  of  that     literature       Period: 
of  melancholy"  which  Milton's  77  Penseroso,       "The,, 
acting    upon    the   awakening  romantic  sense 
of  the  second  quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century,  brought 
forth  in  remarkable  profusion.     A  large  part  of  the  charm 
of  the  Elegy  comes  from  the  poet's  personal,  sensitive 
approach  to  his  subject.     He  lingers  in  the  churchyard, 
noting  the  signs  of  approaching  nightfall,  until  the  atmos- 
phere of  twilight  musing  is  established,  after  which  his  re- 
flections upon  life  and  death  have  a  tone  of  sad  and  in- 
timate  sincerity.     In  its  recognition  of  the  dignity  of 
simple  lives  lived  close  to  the  soil,  and  in  its  sympathy 
with  their  fate,  the  "Elegy"  shows  the  breaking-up  of 
the  hard  forms  into  which  social  feeling  had  stiffened, 
and  looks  forward  to  the  humanitarian  enthusiasm  which 
marked    the    later    phases    of    romantic   poetry.     "The 
Progress  of  Poesy"  is  a  Pindaric  ode,  of  the 
same  type  as  Dryden's  "Alexander's  Feast," 
but    (under   Milton's   influence)    it   is   more      Poesy. 
richly  rhymed,  fuller  of  metrical  artifice  and 
surprise.     It  has  the  too  conscious  elegance  of  diction 
and  employs  the  pseudoclassic  mythology  of  Queen  Anne 
poetry,  but  in  the  richness  of  its  music  it  shows  the  ro- 
mantic temper.     "The  Bard"  is  more  dis-    «TheBard,, 
tinctly  romantic,  both  in  subject  and  treat- 
ment.    An  ancient  minstrel,  the  last  of  the  Welsh  sing- 
ers, escaped  from  Edward's  massacre,  stops  the  King  in  a 
wild  mountain-pass,  and  prophesies  the  terrors  which  are 
to   gather  over  his  descendants.     This  poem,   with  its 
imaginative  rekindling  of  the  passion  of  an  ancient  and 
perished  people,  shows,  like  Collins's  ode  "On  the  Su- 
perstitions of  the  Highlands,"  that  reversion  to  the  Mid- 

1  Begun  in  1742,  but  laid  aside  and  not  finished  until  1750. 


'244  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

die  Ages  for  inspiration  which  soon  became  the  leading 
feature  of  romantic  art. 

The  third  period  of  Gray's  production  shows  how  deep 
a  hold  mediaevalism  had  already  taken  on  him.     He  mas- 
tered old  Norse  material,  probably  in  trans-' 

iSi™  lation>  and  studied  Welsh-  The  fruits  of 
Icelandic  and  these  researches  were  two  powerful  transla- 
studtes  tions,  as  grim  and  picturesque  as  the  most 

romantic  heart  could  desire — "The  Fatal  Sis- 
ters" and  "The  Descent  of  Odin"  (1761). 

A  great  stimulus  was  given  to  the  curiosity  concerning 
mediaeval  literature  by  the  appearance  in  1765  of  a  bal- 
lad collection  entitled  Reliques  of  Ancient  English  Poetry, 
gathered  together  by  Bishop  Percy,  an  antiquarian 
scholar  with  literary  tastes.  These  ballads  had  a  great 
effect  in  quickening  the  romantic  impulse,  by  virtue  of 
their  naive  feeling  and  simple,  passionate  expression. 
About  the  same  time  as  the  Reliques  appeared  another 
book  which,  though  not  so  genuine,  had  an  even  greater 
effect.  This  was  an  epic  poem  in  irregular  chanting  prose, 
entitled  Fingal,  purporting  to  have  been  originally  writ- 
Ossian  ten  ^n  tne  anc^ent  Gaelic  tongue  of  the  Scotch 

highlands  by  Ossian,  the  son  of  Fingal,  a 
Celtic  hero  traditionally  said  to  belong  to  the  third  cen- 
tury. The  figures  of  the  story  are  shadowy  and  large, 
the  scenery  wild,  the  imagery,  at  least  to  an  uncritical 
reader,  touched  with  a  certain  primitive  sublimity  and 
grandeur,  and  the  whole  pervaded  by  an  atmosphere  of 
melancholy  which  is  emphasized  in  the  sighing  cadences 
of  the  style.  Here  is  a  specimen: 

By  the  side  of  a  rock  on  the  hill,  beneath  the  ancient  trees,  old 
Ossian  sat  on  the  moss;  the  last  of  the  race  of  Fingal.  Dull 
through  the  leafless  trees  he  heard  the  voice  of  the  north.  .  .  . 
Fair  with  her  locks  of  gold,  her  smooth  neck,  and  her  breasts  of 
snow;  fair  as  the  spirits  of  the  hills  when  at  silent  noon  they  glide 
along  the  heath — came  Minvane  the  maid.  Fingal,  she  softly 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  245 

saith,  loose  me  my  brother  Gaul.  Loose  me  the  hope  of  my  race, 
the  terror  of  all  but  Fingal.  .  .  .  Take  thy  brother,  O  Minvane, 
thou  fairer  than  the  snows  of  the  north! 

These  "Ossianic"  poems  seem  to  have  been  in  large  part 
a  clever  literary  fabrication,  the  work  of  a  young  Scotch- 
man named  Macpherson,  who  probably  got  his  hint  from 
genuine  fragments  of  old  Erse  poetry.  Their  air  of  pri- 
meval sublimity  was  specious  enough  to  make  them  pass 
current  with  an  age  which  was  weary  of  the  classical  tra- 
ditions and  eager  for  novel  sensation,  and  their  influence 
was  enormous,  not  only  in  England  but  upon  the  Conti- 
nent, in  furthering  the  new  taste  for  the  mysterious  past. 
Less  successful  in  attracting  attention,  but  more  sig- 
nificant because  springing  from  a  deeper  artistic  instinct, 
was  the  series  of  literary  forgeries  put  forth 
by  the  "marvellous  boy,"  Thomas  Chatter-  ^ea^f's 
ton  (1752-1770).  His  childhood  was  passed  imitations, 
in  the  shadow  of  the  church  of  Saint  Mary 
Redcliffe,  Bristol,  and  the  beautiful  old  building,  with  its 
rich  historical  associations,  threw  upon  his  sensitive  mind 
a  spell  which  was  almost  a  mania.  Some  old  parchments 
from  the  archives  of  the  church  fell  into  his  hands;  while 
deciphering  thern  he  conceived  the  daring  scheme  of 
composing  poems  and  prose  pieces  in  the  mediaeval  style 
and  diction,  and  of  palming  them  off  upon  the  good  bur- 
ghers of  the  town,  as  originals  which  he  had  unearthed 
in  the  muniment  room  of  the  church.  Incredible  as  it 
seems,  he  began  this  work  in  his  twelfth  year.  The  first 
"historical"  document  which  he  submitted  to  his  towns- 
men was  a  description  of  the  opening  of  the  old  Bristol 
bridge.  As  this  aroused  some  interest,  he  composed  an 
elaborate  series  of  poems  and  prose  pieces  grouped  about 
the  figure  of  William  Canynge,  mayor  of  Bristol  under 
Henry  VI,  purporting  to  be  the  work  of  one  Rowley,  a 
fifteenth-century  priest.  Some  of  the  poems,  especially 
"Aella,"  "The  Bristowe  Tragedy,"  and  the  "Ballade  of 


246  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Charitie,"  are  of  remarkable  beauty  and  force;  and  when 
we  remember  that  the  author  of  them  was  scarcely  more 
than  a  child,  they  become  astonishing.  After  a  proud 
struggle  to  make  his  living  by  his  pen,  Chatterton  ended 
his  morbid  and  amazingly  precocious  life  by  suicide  in  a 
London  garret,  at  the  age  of  eighteen.  He  was  a  signal 
example  of  the  romantic  temper  destined  soon  to  spread 
through  the  nation.  It  was  fitting  that,  when  the  battle 
of  the  new  poetry  was  fought  and  won,  Keats  should 
dedicate  Endymion  to  his  memory,  and  Shelley  should 
place  him  in  "Adonais"  among  the  "inheritors  of  unful- 
filled renown." 

II 

It  must  be  held  in  mind  that  the  new  literary  move- 
ment which  we  have  been  tracing  was  the  work  of  a 
Persistence  sma11  coterie  of  men>  for  the  most  part  com- 
ofthe  paratively  obscure.  They  were  the  revolu- 

SaditSns.  tionists>  who  had  declared  their  independence 
^  of  the  reigning  mode.  But  the  conservative 
writers,  with  Johnson  and  Goldsmith  at  their  head,  still 
had  very  great  authority,  and  the  classical  traditions  con- 
tinued to  be  widely  accepted.  In  the  third  quarter  of 
the  century  Samuel  Johnson  succeeded  to  that  primacy 
in  English  literature  which  had  earlier  belonged  to  Dry- 
den  and  to  Pope;  but  it  is  significant  of  the  inroads  which 
the  romantic  revival  was  making  into  the  received 
traditions  of  eighteenth-century  criticism  that,  though 
Johnson  was  of  a  more  absolute  temper  than  either  of 
his  predecessors,  his  sway  was  never  so  complete  as  theirs. 

Johnson's  life  is  typical  of  the  social  conditions  under 
^  which  literature  was  practised,  after  it  could 

Position'S  no  longer  command  high  political  reward,  and 
Writers.  was  obliged  to  rely  entirely  upon  the  public. 
The  reading  public  was  of  slow  growth. 
The  writers  who  depended  upon  it  were  compelled  to 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  .  247 

live  in  a  squalid  bohemia — not  unlike  that  inhabited 
by  the  popular  group  of  authors  in  the  age  of  Elizabeth 
— and  to  put  forth  a  mass  of  bad  poetry,  criticism,  and 
journalism  merely  for  bread.  The  name  of  the  street 
where  many  of  them  lived,  Grub  Street,  became  a  syn- 
onym for  hack  writing  and  poverty.  The  aristocratic 
traditions  of  the  profession  were  supported  by  men  of 
the  highest  reputation,  like  Pope,  who  could  approach 
the  public  directly  through  the  subscription  list;  but  for 
the  ordinary  writer  there  was  no  resource  except  servi- 
tude to  the  literary  broker  or  bookseller.  Under  these 
hard  conditions  Johnson  and  his  friends  slowly  made 
their  way  to  distinction;  from  that  Grub  Street  which 
Pope  and  Swift  had  scornfully  lampooned,  came  their 
successors  in  power  and  reputation. 

Samuel  Johnson  was  born  in  1709,  the  son  of  a  Lich- 
field  bookseller.  He  was  at  Oxford  for  a  time,  but  his 
father's  failure  obliged  him  to  leave  the  uni- 
versity, and  after  vainly  trying  to  win  his  Johnson, 
bread  as  a  teacher,  he  tramped  to  London. 
Here  he  lived  in  a  state  of  wretchedness  which  is  reflected 
in  his  Life  of  Savage,  a  poet  who  was  his  companion  in 
Grub  Street  misery.  Often  the  friends  walked  the  streets 
from  dusk  to  dawn  for  want  of  mere  shelter.  One  re- 
source was,  indeed,  open  to  them.  Following  the  success 
of  The  Taller  and  The  Spectator,  had  come  the  periodical 
magazine  of  miscellaneous  literature,  of  which  the  Gen- 
tleman's Magazine  (1731)  and  the  London  Magazine  were 
the  first.  For  some  years  Johnson  wrote  for  the  Gentle- 
man's Magazine  reports  of  the  debates  in  Parliament. 
His  first  poem,  "London"  (1738),  gave  him  some  reputa- 
tion, which  was  increased  by  "The  Vanity  of  Human 
Wishes"  (1749),  and  by  his  drama  Irene  (1749)*  a  stiff 
classical  tragedy,  which  was  staged  by  the  good  nature 
of  his  friend  and  former  pupil,  David  Garrick.  He  wrote 
also  essays  after  The  Spectator  model,  called  The  Rambler 


248  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

(1750-1752).  But  his  pre-eminent  position  came  to  him 
after  the  publication  of  his  Dictionary  of  the  English  Lan- 
guage, in  1755.  When  he  had  announced  this  work  seven 
years  before,  Johnson  had  sought  the  support  and  patron- 
age of  Lord  Chesterfield,  but  the  latter  had  been  con- 
temptuously cold  toward  the  project.  When  the  work 
was  about  to  appear,  however,  the  nobleman  let  it  be 
known  that  he  would  accept  and  reward  the  dedication 
of  the  work  to  himself;  but  it  was  Johnson's  turn,  and  in 
his  famous  letter  to  Chesterfield  he  wrote  for  English 
literature  its  final  declaration  of  independence  from  the 
institution  of  patronage. 

The  Dictionary  made  Johnson's  fame  and  state  secure. 
In  1764  he  formed  with  Burke,  Goldsmith,  Gibbon,  and 
others  the  famous  Literary  Club,  as  chief 
ffis  Latei  member  of  which  he  held  the  unquestioned 
headship  of  contemporary  letters  in  England. 
Still,  Johnson  was  poor;  and  to  the  end  of  his  life  he  was 
forced  to  labor  to  support  himself  and  the  various  persons 
who  fell  dependent  upon  him.  The  oriental  apologue, 
Rasselas,  appeared  in  1759.  He  wrote  other  series  of 
essays,  The  Adventurer  and  The  Idler.  He  edited  Shake- 
speare. He  undertook  the  preparation  of  a  series  of  lives 
of  the  English  poets,  which  appeared  between  1779  and 
1781.  He  died  in  1784. 

Both  in  his  original  writing  and  in  his  criticism  upon 
the  writings  of  others,  Johnson  emphasizes  the  classical 
Johnson's  dependence  upon  accepted  models  and  at- 
ciassicism.  tained  results,  as  opposed  to  romantic  ex- 
periment and  aspiration.  In  his  poetry  he 
followed  Pope's  use  of  the  heroic  couplet.  Like  Pope, 
also,  he  modelled  his  poems  on  the  works  of  Latin  writers; 
his  "London,"  for  example,  being  a  general  attack  upon 
the  evils  of  society,  in  close  imitation  of  Juvenal.  His 
sympathy  with  classical  ideals  led  him  to  observe  the 
unities  in  his  play  Irene.  In  his  prose  he  continued  the 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  249 

work  of  Dryden  and  Addison.  His  two  most  important 
prose  works,  his  Introduction  to  Shakespeare  and  his  Lives 
of  the  Poets,  illustrate  the  point  of  view  in  matters  of  art 
which  Dryden  had  established;  and  his  essays  are  mod- 
elled upon  the  form  set  by  The  Taller,  though  Johnson's 
essays  are  longer,  heavier,  and  duller  than  Addison's. 
His  moral  tone,  too,  is  more  serious;  for  he  looked  at 
morality  from  the  point  of  view  of  character,  rather  than 
from  that  of  civilization.  His  essays  on  the  "Necessity  of 
Punctuality,"  on  "Idleness,"  on  "The  Luxury  of  a  Vain 
Imagination,"  are  serious,  though  somewhat  commonplace 
studies  in  the  conduct  of  life.  Indeed,  the  seriousness  of 
Johnson's  moral  tone  is  everywhere  pronounced;  and  in 
this  respect,  too,  he  is  a  genuine  representative  of  the 
classic  era,  in  its  worthier  aspects.  His  "Vanity  of  Hu- 
man Wishes  "  is  written  in  a  strain  of  moral  elevation.  He 
accepted  without  question  the  classical  fiction  that  works 
of  art  should  somehow  do  good  to  people;  even  his  Lives 
of  the  Poets  he  hopes  are  "written  in  such  a  manner  as 
may  tend  to  the  promotion  of  piety." 

But  although,  in  these  particulars,  Johnson  illustrates 
the  formally  accepted  point  of  view  of  the  classical  age, 
there  are  many  signs  in  him  of  an  individual  action 

reaction  against  it.  It  is  true,  he  was  a  clas-  Against 
sicist  in  his  insistence  upon  the  universal  in 
taste,  as  opposed  to  the  individual.  But  at 
the  same  time  his  sensible,  reality-loving  habit  of  mind 
led  him  to  hit  a  sham  when  he  saw  it,  even  such  a  ven- 
erable and  reverenced  sham  as  the  unities  of  dramatic 
action.  In  spite  of  his  own  conformity  to  classical  re- 
quirement in  Irene,  he  boldly  points  out,  in  his  criticism 
of  Shakespeare,  that  the  acceptance  of  any  theatrical 
production  as  real,  involves  such  concessions  from  the 
imagination  of  the  audience  that  it  is  not  in  common  sense 
to  refuse  license  in  minor  matters.  His  attitude  on  this 
and  other  points  serves  to  illustrate  the  reason  of  the 


250  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

eighteenth  century  at  war  with  the  principles  of  art  which 
had  been  long  assumed  to  be  the  highest  expression  of 
that  reason.  His  position  in  the  world  of  letters  strik- 
ingly illustrates  the  approaching  end  of  the  era  which  had 
begun  with  the  Restoration.  His  real  sense  of  the  values 
of  things,  and  his  freedom  from  cant,  tended  to  shake 
his  faith  in  pseudoclassical  formulae;  and  his  personal 
force,  his  independence  of  character,  his  very  prejudices, 
made  broadly  in  the  direction  of  individualism  as  against 
authority  in  criticism  and  thus  prepared  the  way  for  the 
romantic  reaction. 

ji  The  Rambler  essays  show,  perhaps  more  saliently  than 
any  other  of  Johnson's  writings,  those  peculiarities  which 
Bis  st  le  ^ave  mac*e  n*s  style  a  byword  for  heaviness. 
The  diction  involves  a  large  proportion  of 
Latin  words,  due,  as  has  been  humorously  suggested,  to 
the  fact  that  Johnson  was  then  at  work  on  his  lexicon, 
and  used  his  Rambler  as  a  track  where  he  could  exercise 
the  words  that  had  grown  stiff  from  long  disuse.  More- 
over, Johnson  doubles  epithets,  adds  illustrations,  de- 
velops, expands,  modifies,  balances,  repeats,  and  exhausts 
the  idea  before  he  will  have  done  with  it.  His  sentences 
are  thus  complicated  and  weighty,  full  of  inversions,  de- 
pending much  on  rhetorical  artifices  such  as  antithesis; 
and  climax.  But  this  elaborate  manner  is  not  always 
out  of  place.  It  occasionally  gives  to  Johnson's  writing 
a  sombre  and  splendid  eloquence,  as  in  the  opening  pas- 
sage of-Rasselas.  Moreover,  he  could  be  simple  and  col- 
loquial when  he  chose;  and  his  later  works,  possibly  be- 
cause they  were  written  more  hurriedly,  are  much  more 
terse  and  rapid.  In  general,  Johnson's  influence  on  Eng- 
lish style  was  a  good  one.  While  he  confirmed  the  tradi- 
tion of  order,  correctness,  and  lucidity,  which  had  begun 
with  Dryden,  he  introduced  a  greater  variety  of  effect, 
a  more  complex  sentence  structure,  and  a  more  copious 
diction.  He  showed  how,  even  within  the  rules  of  com- 


BEGINNINGS   OF  ROMANTICISM  251 

position  defined  in  practice  by  Dryden  and  Addison,  the 
richness  and  variety  of  Elizabethan  prose  might  be 
attempted. 

Johnson  had  in  him  a  force  of  character  far  greater 
than  he  succeeded  in  bringing  to  bear  on  any  of  "his  lit- 
erary undertakings.  This  force  of  character 
strongly  impressed  his  contemporaries,  and  BosweU's 
has  been  transmitted  to  later  times  by  the 
extraordinary  zeal  and  ability  of  the  greatest 
of  all  biographers,  James  Boswell,  whose  Life  of  Johnson 
(1791)  is  one  of  the  classics  of  the  century.  It  begins 
with  the  year  1763,  when  its  author  first  met  Johnson. 
From  that  meeting  Boswell  followed  the  great  man's 
doings  and  sayings  with  unwearied  attention.  In  his  ef- 
fort to  draw  Johnson  out  and  to  make  him  expressive,  he 
was  deterred  by  no  rebuffs,  and  he  was  not  ashamed  to 
offer  himself  as  the  butt  of  his  master's  wit.  For  twenty 
years  he  worked  with  his  eye  constantly  upon  his  subject, 
and  was  then  prepared,  with  the  same  cheerful  sacrifice 
of  his  own  dignity,  to  write  the  biography  which  still 
keeps  Johnson  in  the  place  which  he  won,  that  of  the 
most  salient  figure  of  his  epoch.  Of  no  man  in  the  past 
is  our  perception  so  extraordinarily  keen  and  first-hand, 
His  bulky,  awkward  appearance,  his  brusque,  overbear- 
ing manner,  his  portentous  voice,  his  uncouth  gestures 
and  attitudes,  his  habits  of  whistling  or  "clucking  like  a 
hen"  in  the  intervals  of  speaking,  and  of  "blowing  out 
his  breath  like  a  whale"  when  he  had  finished — all  these 
have  come  down  to  us,  together  with  the  record  of  a 
great  mass  of  his  conversation.  It  is  in  this  last  that 
Johnson's  power  and  BoswelPs  skill  are  most  strikingly 
manifested.  Johnson  wrote  much,  but  nearly  always 
under  the  spur  of  necessity;  he  talked  spontaneously. 
His  reputation,  indeed,  rests  largely  upon  such  sayings 
as  "Being  in  a  ship  is  like  being  in  gaol  with  the  chance 
of  drowning."  or  "A  woman's  preaching  is  like  a  dog's 


252  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

walking  on  his  hind  legs.  It  is  not  done  well,  but  you 
are  surprised  to  find  it  done  at  all."  In  such  scraps  of 
homely  comment  the  practical  sense  of  the  age  expressed 
itself  as  vividly  and  rememberably  as  in  Pope's  couplets. 
To  Boswell's  Life,  then,  Johnson  owes  his  latter-day 
reputation  as  an  eccentric,  and  as  a  sayer  of  good  things. 
But  there  is  another  Johnson  whom  Boswell 
character  knew  without  comprehending — the  stricken, 
hopeless,  much-enduring,  brave,  pious  soul, 
who  exemplifies  so  much  of  what  is  wholly  admirable  in 
human  nature.  For  Johnson  suffered  grievously  in  life; 
and  as  he  grew  older  his  philosophy  came  to  be  a  serious 
and  considered  pessimism.  In  Rasselas  he  deals  hon- 
estly with  the  question  of  human  happiness;  and  he  finds 
that  life  is  almost  barren  of  joy,  that  escape  from  pain 
is  the  highest  felicity.  He  made  no  attempt  to  blink  the 
facts  of  existence;  he  had  no  imaginative  coloring  to  give 
them;  and  yet  he  faced  life  always  with  energy  and 
courage.  In  spite  of  everything,  in  spite  even  of  weak- 
ness in  his  own  character,  he  believed  in  himself.  In  his 
strenuousness,  his  morality,  his  refusal  to  yield  ground 
anywhere  to  the  evils  without  or  the  foes  within,  in  his 
resolve  to  draw  inspiration  from  his  own  shortcomings, 
in  all  this  Johnson  is  a  great  man,  and  for  this  he  deserves 
his  fame. 

Johnson's  so-called  dictatorship  of  English  letters  was 
largely  the  result  of  his  conversational  supremacy  in  the 
Literary  Club,  which  included  nearly  all  the 
Goldsmith.  famous  writers  of  the  time.  Next  to  John- 
son himself  its  most  notable  figure  was  Oliver 
Goldsmith.  Goldsmith  was  born  in  1728  in  Ireland, 
where  his  father  had  a  small  living.  He  was  a  dull  boy 
at  school,  and  had  an  undistinguished  career  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Dublin.  He  then  went  to  Edinburgh  to  study 
medicine,  and  afterward  to  Leyden;  whence  he  begged  his 
way  over  a  large  part  of  Europe,  returning  to  London  in 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  253 

1756.  After  an  unsuccessful  attempt  as  a  schoolmaster, 
he  took  to  literature  as  it  was  practised  in  Grub  Street, 
and  became  a  hack  writer  for  various  magazines.  His 
papers  called  The  Citizen  of  the  World  (1760-1761),  which 
he  wrote  for  the  Public  Ledger,  consisted  of  observations 
upon  English  life  written  from  the  point  of  view  of  a 
Chinaman.  In  1764  Johnson  found  him  one  day  in  his 
lodgings,  the  prisoner  of  his  unpaid  landlady,  with  the 
manuscript  of  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield  by  him.  Johnson 
sold  the  book,  which  appeared  some  fifteen  months  later, 
after  Goldsmith  had  published  his  first  successful  poem, 
The  Traveller.  His  second  venture  into  poetry,  The  De- 
serted Village,  appeared  in  1770.  Meanwhile  Goldsmith 
had  turned  to  the  stage,  producing  The  Good-Natured  Man 
in  1768,  and  She  Stoops  to  Conquer  in  1773,  the  year  be- 
fore his  death. 

Goldsmith  is  almost  as  well  known  to  us  as  Johnson, 
and  largely  through  the  same  agency,  the  industry  of 
Boswell.  He  is  portrayed  in  the  Life  of 
Johnson  as  the  second  luminary  of  the  club, 
the  only  member  who  dared  persistently  to 
provoke  the  wrath  of  the  dictator.  Again  and  again 
Boswell  shows  us  Johnson  and  Goldsmith,  the  heavily 
armed  soldier  and  the  deft  slinger.  Occasionally  Johnson 
bore  down  his  opponent  by  sheer  weight,  but  more  often 
Goldsmith  sent  his  stone  to  its  mark  and  made  good  his 
retreat.  Sometimes  his  success  turned  on  a  mere  trick; 
but  often  his  replies  were  compact  of  sense  and  salt,  as 
when  he  doubted  Johnson's  ability  to  write  a  fable  be- 
cause he  would  inevitably  make  the  little  fishes  talk  like 
whales.  Goldsmith's  wariness  in  conversation  did  not 
accompany  him  into  the  more  practical  walks  of  life.  He 
was  invariably  in  difficulties,  pecuniary  or  social;  partly 
through  his  generosity,  in  which  he  resembled  his  own 
Good-Natured  Man,  partly  through  his  blind  trust  in  the 
world.  For  Goldsmith  was,  in  one  sense  at  least,  the 


254  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

antithesis  of  Swift.  He  gave  himself  freely;  he  threw 
himself  upon  life  with  the  naive  imprudence  of  a  child. 
Whether  traversing  Europe  as  a  penniless  student  or  sell- 
ing his  masterpieces,  Goldsmith  took  no  thought  for  the 
morrow.  And  with  this  confidence  in  his  fellows  went  a 
great  love  for  them,  a  love  apparent  in  all  the  writings 
into  which  he  put  his  real  self.  His  papers  in  TJie  Citizen 
of  the  World,  though,  like  Addison's,  often  directed  against 
the  faults  and  absurdities  of  men,  have  a  tenderness 
which  goes  beyond  Addison's  mildness,  a  note  of  kinship 
that  is  very  different  from  The  Spectator's  aloofness. 
Goldsmith's  poems  are  written  in  the  metre  of  Pope,  but 
in  spirit  they  are  far  removed  from  Pope's  satirical  hard- 
ness. In  place  of  the  savage  sketches  of  Atticus  and 
Bufo  in  The  Epistle  to  Arbuthnot,  we  have  the  village  par- 
son in  The  Deserted  Village.  And  it  is  to  be  noted  that, 
though  Goldsmith  had  no  personal  sympathy  with  the 
rising  romantic  school,  his  interest  in  remote,  obscure, 
and  unfortunate  phases  of  human  life,  which  appears  in 
The  Traveller,  his  championship  of  the  individual  against 
the  institution  which  would  crush  him,  in  The  Deserted 
Village,  mark  him  as  a  precursor  of  the  Romantic  Move- 
ment. 

A  criticism  that  has  often  been  made  of  Goldsmith's 
Deserted  Village  is  that  the  picture  of  Auburn  in  its 
prosperity  could  never  apply  to  an  Irish 
toSConqier!"  hamlet.  The  same  criticism  might  be  applied 
more  broadly  to  all  his  work.  To  him  realism 
was  impossible,  because  in  his  whole  experience  of  life 
he  invariably  read  the  world  in  terms  of  his  own  idealism. 
This  idealism  gives  its  coloring  to  his  novel,  and  also  to 
his  comedies.  She  Stoops  to  Conquer,  the  best  known  of 
them,  presents  us,  soon  after  the  opening  of  the  play, 
with  a  riotous  scene  at  the  ''Three  Pigeons,"  led  by  the 
loutish  squire,  Tony  Lumpkin.  Two  travellers  appear, 
whom  Tony  directs  to  the  house  of  his  stepfather,  Mr. 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  255 

Hardcastle,  as  to  an  inn.  The  travellers  are  young  Mar- 
low,  whom  Hardcastle  is  expecting  as  the  suitor  for  his 
daughter,  and  his  friend  Hastings.  Hardcastle  recognizes 
them;  but  Marlow,  and  Hastings  also  for  a  time,  believe 
themselves,  to  be  in  a  hostelry,  think  Hardcastle  is  the 
host  and  his  daughter  the  servant,  and  behave  accord- 
ingly. The  situation,  however,  favors  the  love-affair  be- 
tween Miss  Hardcastle  and  Marlow;  'for  the  latter,  who 
has  never  been  able  to  conquer  his  bashfulness  with 
ladies  of  condition,  finds  his  path  easy  with  the  supposed 
barmaid. 

The  play  is  a  charming  idyl,  in  which  the  rough  edges 
of  the  world  are  ground  smooth,  in  which  faults  turn  out 
to  be  virtues,  and  mistakes  to  be  blessings.  At  times 
the  stage-land  copies  the  actual  world  with  fidelity,  as  in 
the  scene  at  the  "Three  Pigeons,"  and  in  the  simple 
country  life  in  Hardcas tie's  home.  Tony  Lumpkin  is  a 
genuine  child  of  the  soil.  But  the  magic  of  comedy  is 
over  all,  a  magic  indeed  much  subdued  from  the  brilliant 
romanticism  of  Shakespeare's  day,  but  still  potent.  For 
the  sober  theatre  of  the  late  eighteenth  century,  She 
Stoops  to  Conquer  is  a  kind  of  prose  Tempest,  the  most 
victorious  assertion  in  its  age  of  the  mood  of  the  idyl. 

Goldsmith's  plays  are  a  reflection  of  the  idealism  which 
was  beginning  to  manifest  itself  in  the  realistic  age.     Op- 
posed to  him  is  Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan 
(1751-1816),   whose  dramas   are  written  in        j^^tey 
the    mood    of    satirical    observation   of    the        Sheridan, 
surface  of  life  which  the  eighteenth-century 
novel  expressed,  from  Fielding  to  Miss  Burney.     Sheri- 
dan was  born  at  Dublin  of  English-Irish  stock.     After  a 
romantic  runaway  marriage  he  settled  in  London;  and 
when  only  twenty- three  he  produced  The  Rivals  and  The 
Duenna   (1775).     In   1777,  after  his  assumption  of  the 
directorship  of  Drury  Lane  Theatre,  he  put  on  his  best 
play,  The  School  for  Scandal,  and  in  1779  The  Critic. 


356  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

In  The  Rivals  we  have  the  immortal  Mrs.  Malaprop; 
her  niece,  Lydia  Languish,  the  romantic  heroine;  and 
Lydia's  lovers,  Bob  Acres,  Sir  Lucius  O'Trig- 
RiSdV"  Ser>  and  CaPtam  Absolute,  the  last  masquer- 

ading under  the  name  Beverley..  Absolute 
thinks  at  first  that  he  is  loving  in  opposition  to  his  father's 
will,  and  when  he  finds  that  Lydia  is  the  very  bride  picked 
out  for  him,  he  continues  to  maintain  with  her  his  char- 
acter of  Beverley,  as  an  appeal  to  her  romantic  spirit. 
The  plot  involves  some  absurdities,  but  it  is  fertile  in 
amusing  situations,  and  the  play  abounds  in  clever  dia- 
logue. 

The  School  for  Scandal  opens  in  the  eighteenth-century 
world  of  fashion,  which,  in  its  frivolous  artificiality,  lent 
itself  readily  to  the  purposes  of  the  comedian. 
In  this  corrupt  society  Lady  Teazle  has,  for 
form's  sake,  provided  herself  with  a  lover, 
Joseph  Surface.  Meanwhile  Joseph,  a  cold-hearted  hypo- 
crite, has  plans  of  his  own,  one  of  which  is  to  marry  Sir 
Peter  Teazle's  ward,  Maria,  and  another  to  supplant  his 
own  brother  Charles,  a  good-natured  spendthrift,  in  their 
uncle's  affection.  The  uncle,  Sir  Oliver,  returns  from 
India,  introduces  himself  as  a  money-lender  to  Charles, 
whom  he  finds  ready  to  sell  even  his  family  portraits, 
except  that  of  Sir  Oliver  himself.  This  modest  bit  of 
loyalty  serves  to  reinstate  the  prodigal  in  his  uncle's  good 
opinion;  while  Joseph,  discovered  on  all  sides,  fades  out 
of  the  play  in  disgrace. 

It  is  evident  that  here  we  have  an  amusing  mock  world, 
where  the  principles,  moral  and  social,  on  which  human 
life  is  actually  conducted  are  subordinated  to  the  necessi- 
ties of  an  intrigue.  The  characters  bear  an  amazing 
similitude  to  real  people;  indeed,  many  of  them  have  long 
been  accepted  as  exact  delineations  of  certain  qualities 
and  types;  but  we  never  forget  while  we  are  with  them 
that  we  are  in  stage-land.  At  first  sight  The  School  for 


BEGINNINGS   OF   ROMANTICISM  257 

Scandal,  with  its  opening  scenes  in  which  gossip  runs 
wild,  seems  to  revive  the  world  of  the  Restoration  drama, 
but  there  is  a  difference.  Light,  trifling,  frivolous  as  is 
Sheridan's  society,  it  is  not  fundamentally  and  flagrantly 
immoral.  His  people  play  with  fire,  but  they  are  not 
burned.  So  much  had  the  moral  and  social  force  of  the 
century  accomplished,  in  the  years  since  Collier's  attack 
on  the  stage. 

It  may  have  been  owing  to  the  development  of  the 
magazine  that  the  work  of  the  men  of  Johnson's  period 
was  in  general  of  so  miscellaneous  a  charac- 
ter. From  this  charge,  however,  must  be  Gibbon! 
excepted  Edward  Gibbon  (1737-1794),  who 
is  known  for  a  single  work.  From  his  youth  Gibbon  be- 
lieved in  his  destiny  as  a  historian;  and,  like  Milton,  he 
sought  long  for  a  subject  worthy  of  his  powers.  At  last, 
while  on  a  visit  to  Rome  in  1764,  the  idea  of  writing  a 
history  of  the  decline  and  fall  of  the  empire  came  to  his 
mind.  Four  years  later  he  began  to  work  at  this  subject. 
In  1776  his  first  volume  appeared,  but  it  was  not  until 
after  eleven  years  more  of  steady  toil  that  the  full  six 
volumes  were  completed. 

Gibbon  is  personally  well  known  to  us  through  his 
frank  account  of  himself  in  his  memoirs — a  man  with  lit- 
tle dignity,  or  presence,  or  passion,  or  hero- 
ism.    Yet  in  the  light  of  his  achievement  his    5i*f e 
life  stands  out  in  almost  heroic  proportions. 
To  his  great  task  everything  in  his  career  was  subsidiary. 
He  served  for  a  time  in  the  militia,  and  he  remarks  that 
the  captain  of  the  Hampshire  Grenadiers  was  not  useless 
to  the  historian  of  the  Roman  Empire.     In  like  manner, 
he  made  his  seat  in  Parliament  merely  a  preparation  for 
his  work,  "a  school  of  civil  prudence,  the  first  and  most 
essential  virtue  of  an  historian."     It  is  this  sureness  of 
inspiration,    this   unity  of  accomplishment  in   Gibbon's 
life,  that  constitute  his  claim  to  something  more  than  the 


258  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

glory  that  belongs  to  literary  success.  In  the  light  of 
his  task  his  negative  qualities  become  positive;  his  vices 
virtues.  As  an  adaptation  of  means  to  end,  Gibbon's  life 
was  a  splendid  performance. 

The  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  treats  the 
history  of  Rome  from  the  second  century  to  the  end  of 
the  fifth,  and  then,  with  a  more  rapid  method, 
*uid  Defects  follows  the  Eastern  or  Byzantine  Empire 
until  the  fall  of  Constantinople.  Of  Gibbon's 
scholarship  there  can  be  no  complaint.  He  was  com- 
pletely master  of  his  authorities,  and  his  treatment  of 
them  is  so  discriminating,  so  fair,  so  thorough,  that  he 
cannot  be  superseded.  Two  serious  faults  in  his  work 
must  be  laid  at  the  door  of  his  century — his  lack  of  philo- 
sophic insight  and  his  lack  of  sympathy  with  spiritual 
movements.  Like  his  contemporaries,  he  distrusted  phi- 
losophy and  disliked  enthusiasm.  Behind  the  facts,  he 
did  not  care  to  penetrate;  in  the  realm  of  emotion  he 
was  uncomprehending.  Hence  his  dry,  hard,  inadequate 
treatment  of  Christianity,  a  treatment  reflecting  his  own 
attitude  and  limitations.  He  had  no  spiritual  interests; 
his  point  of  view  was  consistently  worldly. 

Gibbon's  style  is  of  the  elaborate  type  introduced  by- 
Johnson.  It  is  massive,  solid,  and  exhaustive.  It  sub- 
His  style  stitutes  courtliness  for  ease,  elegance  for 
charm.  Its  excessive  polish  gives  an  effect  of 
insincerity,  at  times  almost  of  mockery.  But,  in  ,the 
large,  the  effect  of  Gibbon's  style  is  commensurate  with 
the  greatness  of  his  theme.  The  rhythmic,  unwearied 
march  of  the  sentences,  the  flashing  of  antithesis,  and  the 
steady  roll  of  the  diction,  are  but  pomp  and  circumstance 
befitting  the  stately  procession  of  emperors  and  nations. 
Chief  among  Gibbon's  literary  qualities  is  his  sense  of 
structure,  which  shows  itself  in  his  faculty  for  handling 
large  masses  of  material.  He  consciously  composed  by 
paragraphs,  each  one  a  unit,  and  each  of,  just  the  right 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  259 

weight.  "It  has  always  been  my  practice,"  he  wrote, 
"  to  cast  a  long  paragraph  in  a  single  mould,  to  try  it  by 
my  ear,  to  deposit  it  in  my  memory,  but  to  suspend  the 
action  of  my  pen  till  I  had  given  the  last  polish  to  my 
work."  This  sense  of  exact  structure,  of  outline,  of  or- 
ganic development,  shows  itself  still  more  in  the  astonish- 
ing architectural  merit  of  the  whole  work.  The  ruin  of 
the  Roman  Empire  is  in  political  history  what  the  fall  of 
man  is  in  theology,  and  Gibbon,  like  Milton,  has  realized 
the  epic  possibilities  of  his  theme. 

If  Gibbon  is  a  monumental  example  of  a  small  personal- 
ity becoming  by  training  and  economy  fit  for  the  greatest 
achievement,  a  corresponding  case  of  a  great  man  expend- 
ing his  powers  with  apparent  fruitlessness,  because  ex- 
pending them  on  passing  affairs,  is  found  in  the  career  of 
Edmund  Burke  (1729-1797).  Goldsmith's  epigram, 

Who,  born  for  the  universe,  narrowed  his  mind, 
And  to  party  gave  up  what  was  meant  for  mankind, 

expressed  the  opinion  of  contemporaries  as  to  Burke's 
career.  Yet  so  penetrating  was  Burke's  thought,  and  so 
noble  its  presentation  that  his  results  are  of  value  to-day, 
irrespective  of  the  occasions  which  called  them  forth. 

Burke  was  a  native  of  Ireland,  and  a  Bachelor  of  Arts 
of  Trinity  College.  He  went  to  London  as  a  student  of 
law,  but  soon  turned  aside  into  literature. 
His  first  works  were  an  ironical  reply  to 
Bolingbroke,  called  A  Vindication  of  Natural 
Society  and  an  Inquiry  into  the  Origin  of  Our  Ideas  on 
the  Sublime  and  the  Beautiful  (1756).  In  1761  he  entered 
politics  as  secretary  of  the  Lord  Deputy  of  Ireland;  and 
later  he  became  secretary  to  the  Marquis  of  Rockingham, 
and  member  of  Parliament.  Although  he  never  held 
high  office,  he  was  for  years  the  brain  of  the  Whig  party 
in  its  effort  to  limit  the  exercise  of  the  royal  prerogative, 
which  George  III,  with  the  assistance  of  the  Tory  party, 


260  A   HISTORY    OF    ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

was  determined  to  extend.  This  was  indeed  the  old 
question  which  went  back  to  the  time  of  the  Plantage- 
nets;  but  there  were  involved  in  it  new  problems,  arising 
from  the  growth  of  England  as  a  colonial  power  both  in 
America  and  in  India.  It  is  Burke's  peculiar  distinction 
that  he  saw  the  dangers  gathering  over  England  from  all 
quarters,  and  strove  to  avert  them.  He 
His  Views  on  pointed  out  the  one  way  of  escape  in  the 
SiSfa"0*  American  situation.  His  speech  on  American 
taxation  was  delivered  in  1774;  his  great 
speech  on  conciliation  with  America  in  1775.  When 
England  emerged  from  the  war  against  the  coalition  of 
European  powers,  with  the  loss  indeed  of  America,  but 
with  victory  in  other  quarters,  Burke  instantly  began  to 
press  his  inquiry  into  the  circumstances  of  that  triumph. 
The  chief  success  of  England  had  been  in  India,  and  the 
man  who  had  won  it  was  Warren  Hastings.  Against  him 
Burke  levelled  his  attack.  Instead  of  thanking  God  that 
things  had  turned  out  so  well,  he  asked  why  they  had 
turned  out  well,  on  what  principles  the  Indian  Empire 
had  been  conquered  and  administered,  and  whether  those 
principles  were  founded  upon  justice  and  humanity.  In 
1785  he  delivered  his  great  arraignment  of  English  meth- 
ods in  India,  in  his  speech  on  The  Nabob  of  Ar cot's  Debts; 
and  the  following  year  he  moved  the  impeachment  of 
Warren  Hastings.  Two  years  later  he  opened  the  case 
before  the  House  of  Lords,  and  he  continued  to  manage 
it  until  the  acquittal  of  Hastings  in  1795. 

Finally,  when  the  dangers  which  Burke  had  appre- 
hended from  the  internal  state  of  England  were  realized 
in  France,  he  threw  himself  toward  the  only 
2?  French011   safety  which  he  could  see,  and  led  the  oppo- 
Revoiution.      sition  to  the  French  Revolution.     This  atti- 
tude involved  a  separation  from  his  party, 
but  Burke  took  the  step  without  flinching.     His  Reflec- 
tions on  ilie  French  Revolution,  published  in   1790,   did 


BEGINNINGS   OF  ROMANTICISM  261 

much  to  check  the  rising  sympathy  with  the  movement 
in  England  and  on  the  Continent.  He  followed  this 
with  Thoughts  on  French  Affairs  (1791),  Appeal  from  the 
New  to  the  Old  Whigs  (1792),  and  Letters  on  a  Regicide 
Peace  (1796-1797).  In  this  opposition  Burke  took  a 
larger  point  of  view  than  that  of  mere  insular  prejudice. 
He  believed  that  England  had  a  world  mission  in  stem- 
ming the  tide  of  revolution,  and  in  marshalling  the  forces 
of  reaction  in  Europe.  Right  or  wrong,  the  struggle  of 
England  against  France  between  1794  and  1815  is  a  splen- 
did act  in  the  drama  of  nations.  It  is  scarcely  too  much 
to  say  that  the  leading  role  which  England  played  in 
those  years  was  cast  for  her  by  Burke.  He  wrote  the 
lines  which  the  cannon  declaimed  at  Trafalgar  and  Water- 
loo. 

There  are  thus  three  periods  in  Burke's  career,  in  which 
his  writings  concerned  successively  America,  India,  and 
France:  a  first  period  of  Cassandra-prophecy,  of  unheeded 
warnings,  and  despised  advice;  a  second  of  vigorous  pur- 
suit of  evil  and  vindication  of  justice;  a  third  of  desperate 
defense  of  the  things  he  believed  in,  against  the  Revolu- 
tion. In  his  first  task  he  was  almost  utterly  unsuccess- 
ful; in  the  second  he  won  a  qualified  success  amid  appar- 
ent failure;  in  the  third  he  was  immensely  victorious.  In 
the  first  two  Burke  was  distinctly  ahead  of  his  age;  in  the 
last  he  was  behind  it.  Nevertheless,  Burke's  reactionary 
tendencies  were  the  result  of  his  character,  and  rested  on 
the  same  practical  philosophy  that  guided  his  thought  in 
other  matters. 

For  Burke  was  in  character  essentially  moderate,  con- 
servative, and  practical.  His  disposition  was  always  to 
work  with  the  materials  which  existed.  He 
was  opposed  to  doctrinaire  theories,  and 
to  schemes  of  doubtful  applicability.  The 
French  Revolution  was,  in  one  way,  a  manifestation  of 
the  rationalism  of  the  eighteenth  century;  of  the  ten- 


262        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

dency  to  try  ail  things  in  society  by  reason  alone,  and  to 
work  out  by  experiments  in  government  the  theories 
which  had  been  expounded  by  speculative  philosophers. 
The  Revolution  was  conceived  in  the  spirit  of  Voltaire's 
belief  that  "they  are  the  most  pestilent  of  all  enemies  of 
mankind  who  discrown  sovereign  reason  to  be  the  serv- 
ing drudge  of  superstition  and  social  usage."  To  Burke, 
on  the  contrary,  reason  was  by  no  means  an  adequate 
measure  of  humanity.  He  took  account  of  other  ele- 
ments, even  of  prejudice, -the  foe  of  reason.  "Through 
just  prejudice,"  he  says,  "a  man's  duty  becomes  part 
of  his  nature."  He  held  that  social  usage,  even  that  su- 
perstition, might  be  a  part  of  the  wisdom  of  the  ages. 
And  for  that  wisdom,  expressed  in  concrete  form  as  in- 
stitutions, the  embodied  result  of  long  experience,  Burke 
had  immense  reverence.  He  held  that  if  institutions 
were  to  change,  it  must  not  be  by  the  mere  arbitrary 
promulgation  of  law.  On  the  contrary  he  says:  "If  a 
great  change  is  to  be  made  in  human  affairs  the  minds  of 
men  will  be  fitted  to  it,  the  general  opinions  and  feelings 
will  draw  that  way,  every  fear,  every  hope  will  forward 
it." 

This  reliance  on  the  ultimate  facts  of  human  character, 

even  its  prejudices   and   weaknesses,    this   trust  in  life 

rather  than  in  reason,  mark  a  certain  con- 

Connection       nection    between    Burke    and    the    romantic 

with  the          school  in  literature.     Still  more  is  this  con- 

Komanucists.  .  *••*•** 

nection  emphasized  by  the  imaginative  power 
of  Burke's  sympathy;  a  sympathy  which  penetrated  to 
the  uttermost  parts  of  the  earth,  making  the  wrongs  of 
the  American  colonists  and  the  sufferings  of  the  Hindus 
as  real  to  him  as  the  conditions  under  which  he  himself 
lived.  Another  point  of  contact  between  Burke  and  the 
romanticists  is  his  power  of  investing  with  interest  and 
color  the  past  experience  of  the  race,  and  of  making  it 
appeal  to  the  imagination.  In  short,  Burke,  like  Scott 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  .         263 

and  Wordsworth,  was  a  romanticist  in  feeling,  though 
often  reactionary  in  faith. 

It  is  the  feeling  behind  his  thought  that  gives  to  Burke's 
style  its  curious,  far-reaching  eloquence.  His  substance 
is  solid,  massive,  full  of  fact,  apparently  most 
refractory  and  inert;  yet  it  is  constantly 
brought  to  a  white  heat  by  the  flame  of  his  passion.  No 
such  style  as  his  had  been  seen  in  England.  He  formed 
it  indeed  on  the  model  of  Bolingbroke,  but  he  has  a  range 
of  effects  to  which  his  master  was  a  stranger — splendid 
imagery,  irony,  fervor,  conviction;  while  in  such  technical 
matters  as  the  articulation  of  his  sentences  and  the  direc- 
tion of  his  paragraphs,  Burke  measured  for  the  first  time 
the  rhetorical  possibilities  of  English  writing. 

With  Burke  the  eighteenth  century  properly  ends.  He 
is  the  last  of  the  group  of  great  writers  whose  chief  inter- 
est was  in  politics,  and  whose  trust  was  in  institutions. 
He  died  while  defending,  with  apparent  success,  the  work 
of  the  century  against  what  seemed  to  him  the  forces  of 
destruction.  But  although  he  uttered  the  formal  doc- 
trine of  the  eighteenth  century,  in  his  deeper  thought  he 
represents  that  spiritual  gain  with  which  humanity  ad- 
vanced into  the  nineteenth. 


Ill 

As  Thomson,  Collins,  and  Gray  form  a  group  of  early 
romantic  poets,  so  at  the  dose  of  the  century  we  find  a 
similar  group  of  later  romanticists  who  illus- 
trate the  progress  of  the  movement,  and  the         Romantic 
richer   fulfilment   of  its  promise,   and  mark         poets. 
the    transition    to    the    great   period    of   ro- 
manticism in  the  nineteenth  century.    They  are  George 
Crabbe,   William   Cowper,   William   Blake,   and   Robert 
Burns. 

George    Crabbe    (1754-1832),    although    he    used    the 


264  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

couplet  verse  and  considered  himself  a  faithful  member 

of  the  school  of  Pope,  marks  the  advent  of  a  new  realism 

in  the  poetic  treatment  of  human  life.     He 

cnbbe.  was  born  in  a  Poor  fisning  village  on  the  Ger- 

man Ocean,  and  in  his  best  early  poem,  The 
Village  (1783),  he  painted  the  life  of  the  poor  as  he  knew 
it,  sternly  and  uncompromisingly— the  steaming  flats  and 
stubbly  commons,  the  damp  and  dirty  houses, 
the  hostile  sea,  from  which  only  a  wretched 
living  could  be  wrung,  the  men  and  women  degraded  by 
harsh  labor  and  coarse  dissipation.  By  his  sincerity  he 
drove  the  artificial  sentiment  of  the  age  from  one  more 
of  its  strongholds.  Crabbe  was  generously  befriended  by 
Burke,  at  a  time  when  he  was  in  dire  distress;  and  through 
Burke's  influence  he  was  admitted  to  holy  orders.  He  set- 
tled in  the  country,  and  for  twenty-two  years  after  his  first 
success  was  completely  silent.  When  he  came  forward 
once  more,  with  The  Parish  Register  (1807)  and  Tales  of 
the  Hall  (1819),  it  was  to  find  himself  in  a  changed  world, 
in  which  singers  and  seers  far  greater  than  he  had  trans- 
formed the  face  of  literature;  so  that  his  country  sketches 
and  tales,  written  still  in  the  old-fashioned  couplet,  looked 
oddly  stiff  and  belated.  But  his  work,  at  its  best,  is  as 
sterling  as  it  is  ungraceful,  and  the  earlier  portion  of  it 
did  good  service  in  breaking  up  the  artificialism  of  the 
eighteenth  century. 

A  more  potent  but  equally  involuntary  work  of  revo- 
lution was  performed  by  William  Cowper  (1731-1800). 
He  was  a  life-long  victim  of  nervous  despon- 
dency,  and  to  this  weakness  was  added  an 
abnormal  proneness  to  religious  terror.  His 
early  life  was  spent  at  Westminster  School,  and  as  a  law 
student  in  London.  Fits  of  gayety  and  states  of  mysti- 
cal exaltation  were  succeeded  by  terrible  periods  of  de- 
pression, and  at  last  by  insanity.  At  the  age  of  fifty-two 
he  was  living  in  the  obscure  village  of  Olney,  where,  under 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  265 

the  care  of  a  widow,  Mrs.  Unwin,  several  years  his  senior, 
he  was  spending  a  peaceful  interval  between  two  attacks 
of  religious  melancholia.  As  an  intellectual  pastime  he 
began  to  write  verse,  in  which  he  had  some  proficiency. 
At  first  he  produced  mere  essays,  in  the  dullest  abstract 
style  of  the  preceding  age.  At  the  suggestion  of  one 
Lady  Austen,  a  bright  and  somewhat  worldly  woman 
who  was  attracted  by  his  shy,  distraught  personality,  he 
began  a  long  poem  in  blank  verse.  The  subject  playfully 
suggested  by  Lady  Austen  was  "The  Sofa,"  an  article  of 
furniture  then  novel.  Cowper  dutifully  "sang  the  sofa." 
But  he  did  net  cease  there;  he  proceeded  to  paint  with 
animated  realism  the  landscapes,  the  changes  of  seasons, 
the  human  types  and  employments  of  the  rural  world 
about  him,  as  well  as  his  own  simple  pleasures  and  occu- 
pations. The  poem  was  published  in  1785  M  „ 
as  The  Task.  A  large  portion  of  The  Task  is 
conventional  enough,  to  be  sure,  and  very  dreary  reading; 
but  here  and  there  one  comes  upon  little  vignettes — the 
figure  of  a  teamster  driving  homeward  in  a  snow-storm, 
a  postman  hurrying  through  the  village  with  his  eagerly 
awaited  bag  of  news  from  the  great  world,  ploughmen  at 
work  in  the  flat  fields  by  the  Ouse — which  are  instinct 
with  vivid  natural  life.  The  amusing  ballad  of  "John 
Gilpin"  also  belongs  to  this  bright  period  of  Cowper 's  life. 
He  afterward  relapsed  into  melancholy,  broken  at  intervals 
by  a  ray  of  poetic  inspiration  such  as  that  which  produced 
his  touching  lines  "On  the  Receipt  of  My  Mother's  Pic- 
ture Out  of  Norfolk,"  deservedly  the  best  known  of  his 
poems.  His  last  poem,  entitled  "The  Castaway,"  is  a 
cry  of  despair  from  the  depths  of  visionary  anguish  into 
which  he  was  now  hopelessly  plunged. 

While  Crabbe  and  Cowper  were  at  work,  two  other 
innovators,  endowed  with  vast  energy  and  working  with 
superb  self-confidence,  were  already  passing  beyond  them. 
One  of  these  was  William  Blake,  an  obscure  London  en- 


266  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

graver;  the  other  was  Robert  Burns,  a  Scotch  plough- 
man. 

William  Blake  (1757-1827),  though  a  poet  and  a  mystic 
of  the  most  extraordinary  genius,  had  little  or  no  influence 
on  his  generation.  The  greater  part  of  his 
message  was  so  obscure,  so  wild,  so  inco- 
herently delivered,  that  even  now,  after  much 
study,  his  commentators  have  succeeded  in  making  clear 
only  a  portion  of  what  he  wrote.  He  belonged  to  that 
type  of  mind  which  in  superstitious  ages  is  called  "pos- 
sessed." When  a  very  young  child  he  one  day  screamed 
with  fear,  because,  he  said,  he  had  seen  God  put  his  face 
to  the  window.  In  boyhood  he  saw  several 
Mysticism.  angels,  very  bright,  standing  in  a  tree  by  the 
roadside.  In  his  manhood,  the  earth  and  the 
air  were  for  him  full  of  spiritual  presences,  all  concerned 
with  his  fate  or  with  that  of  his  friends.  The  following 
extract  from  some  verses,  written  in  mature  manhood 
during  a  country  walk,  are  exceedingly  characteristic: 

With  happiness  stretched  across  the  hills 
In  a  cloud  that  dewy  sweetness  distills; 
With  a  blue  sky  spread  over  with  wings 
And  a  mild  sun  that  mounts  and  sings; 
With  trees  and  fields  full  of  fairy  elves, 
And  little  devils  who  fight  for  themselves; 
With  angels  planted  in  hawthorn  bowers, 
And  God  himself  in  the  passing  hours; 
With  silver  angels  across  my  way, 
And  golden  demons  that  none  can  stay; 
With  my  father  hovering  upon  the  wind, 
And  my  brother  Robert  just  behind, — 
And  my  brother  John,  the  evil  one, 
In  a  black  cloud  making  his  moan; 
With  a  thousand  angels  upon  the  wind 
Pouring  disconsolate  from  behind 
To  drive  them  off, — and  before  my  way 
A  frowning  thistle  implores  my  stay     .     .     . 
With  my  inward  eye  'tis  an  old  man  grey; 
With  my  outward,  a  thistle  upon  my  way. 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  267 

This  sounds  like  downright  madness,  but  Blake  was 
not  mad  in  any  ordinary  sense  of  the  term.  With  a  meta- 
physical gift  which  made  it  natural  for  him  to  move  in 
an  ideal  world,  he  combined  a  visual  imagination  of  ab- 
normal, almost  miraculous  power,  which  enabled  him  to 
give  bodily  form  to  abstractions,  and  to  summon  at  any 
moment  before  him  "armies  of  angels  that  soar,  legions 
of  demons  that  lurk."  Outwardly  he  led  a  regular,  quiet, 
laborious  life,  all  the  while  pouring  out  poems,  drawings, 
and  vast  ''prophetical  books"  full  of  shadowy  mytholo- 
gies and  mystical  thought-systems,  which  show  that  his 
inward  life  was  one  of  perhaps  unparalleled  excitement 
and  adventure.  Leaving  aside  the  prophetical  books, 
which  are  too  obscure  to  count  for  much  in  the  history 
of  literature,  his  fame  as  a  poet  rests  chiefly  on  his  Poeti- 
cal Sketches,  and  on  his  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Experience. 
Amid  much  that  is  unfinished,  and  no  little  that  is  baffling 
to  the  intelligence,  these  little  volumes  contain  some  of 
the  simplest  and  sweetest,  as  well  as  some  of  the  most 
powerful  short  poems  in  the  language.  At  his  best,  Blake 
has  a  simplicity  as  great  as  Wordsworth's,  and  a  magic 
which  reminds  us  of  Coleridge,  combined  with  a  depth 
and  pregnancy  of  meaning  peculiar  to  himself.  It  must 
be  admitted  that  he  is  at  his  best  very  rarely,  and  then, 
as  it  were,  by  accident.  In  him  the  whole  transcendental 
side  of  the  Romantic  Movement  was  expressed  by  hint 
and  implication,  though  not  by  accomplishment. 

What  Blake  did  toward  reclaiming  lost  realms  of  the 
spirit  and  the  imagination,  Burns  did,  in  more  signal  de- 
gree, toward  reopening  lost  channels  of  feel- 
ing.    He  was  born  in  a  two-roomed  clay  cot-  Burns, 
tage   in   Ayrshire,    West   Scotland,   in    1759. 
His  parents  were  God-fearing  peasants  of  the  best  Scotch 
type,  who  worked  heroically  to  keep  the  wolf  from  the 
door,  and  to  give  their  children  an  elementary  education. 
At  fifteen  Robert,  the  eldest,  did  a  grown  man's  work  in 


268  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ploughing  and  reaping.  Looking  back  upon  his  youth 
in  after-years  he  described  it  as  "the  cheerless  gloom  of 
a  hermit,  with  the  unceasing  toil  of  a  galley  slave."  But 

this  is  clearly  an  exaggeration,  if  not  a  total 
His  Early  misrepresentation;  for  we  have  his  youthful 
p£tJy!d  poems  to  prove  him  wrong.  The  youth  who 

wrote  the  "Epistle  to  Davie,"  with  its  manly 
philosophy  and  genial  temper,  the  "Address  to  the  Deil," 
with  its  rich  humor  and  fun,  the  "Cotter's  Saturday 
Night,"  bathed  in  its  tender  light  of  fireside  happiness, 
was  neither  a  hermit  nor  a  galley-slave,  but  simply  a 
healthy,  impetuous  farm  lad,  with  a  warm  heart,  a  rich 
nature,  and  a  God-given  genius  for  song.  He  had  had 
a  few  books  of  poetry  to  read,  and  had  heard,  as  every 
Scotch  peasant  hears,  the  floating  ballad  verse  of  the 
countryside.  Then  he  had  begun  to  rhyme,  almost  as 
spontaneously  as  a  bird  begins  to  sing,  or,  as  he  says 
himself,  "for  fun."  Since  he  was  a  spontaneous,  sincere, 
and  absolutely  original  nature,  the  verses  he  strung  to- 
gether carelessly,  as  he  followed  his  plough  "in  glory  and 
in  joy,  along  the  mountain-side,"  were  contributions  to 
the  world's  spiritual  experience;  and  since  he  was  also  a 
born  master  of  words,  they  were  contributions  to  the 
world's  sum  of  beauty. 

Between  his  twenty- third  and  his  twenty- sixth  year 
Burns  wrote  the  larger  portion  of  those  poems  which  have 
made  his  name  loved  wherever  the  Lowland  dialect  is  un- 
derstood. In  these  he  revealed  with  wonderful  complete- 
ness the  rural  Scotland  of  his  day,  illuminated  with  a 
blended  light  of  humor  and  tenderness  the  common  ex- 
periences of  his  peasant  world,  not  forbearing  to  treat 
its  unedifying  and  even  its  scandalous  phases  with  racy 
zest  and  laughing  abandon.  His  large,  genial  nature 
embraces  everything  human  in  the  world  about  him.  He 
celebrates  "Scotch  Drink,"  holds  up  to  laughter  the 
praying  hypocrite  "Holy  Willie,"  and  paints  the  riotous 


BEGINNINGS    OF   ROMANTICISM  269 

games  of  Hallowe'en;  but  he  can  turn  immediately  to 
mourn  over  the  "wee,  modest  crimson- tipped  flower" 
uprooted  in  the  furrow  on  the  mountainside,  and  to  find 
in  a  field-mouse  whose  snug  home  has  been  broken  up 
by  the  ploughshare  a  thing  to  touch  the  springs  of  human 
pity. 

By  the  time  Burns  had  reached  his  twenty-sixth  year 
his  wild  ways  had  got  him  into  desperate  trouble;  his 
father  was  dead,  and  the  hand-to-hand  fight 
that  he  and  his  brother  Gilbert  were  waging 
with  poverty  bade  fair  to  end  in  absolute 
failure.  Distracted  and  despairing,  Burns  determined  to 
go  to  the  West  Indies.  In  order  to  raise  the  passage 
money,  some  one  suggested  that  he  should  publish  the 
poems  which  lay  in  his  desk  in  the  cottage  at  Mossgiel. 
This  he  did,  his  friends  getting  enough  subscribers  from 
among  the  local  gentry  to  make  the  venture  pay.  Neither 
the  author  nor  any  one  else  hoped  for  more  than  a  local 
popularity.  The  little  book  was  published  at  Kilmarnock 
in  1786,  with  the  title.  Poems,  Chiefly  in  the  Scottish  Dia- 
lect. The  few  pounds  brought  in  by  the  small  edition 
were  in  his  pocket,  and  his  trunk  was  sent  forward,  when 
a  letter  from  Edinburgh  arrived  which  changed  the  whole 
face  of  his  fortunes.  It  was  from  an  eminent  scholar  and 
critic,  who  praised  the  book  highly  and  called  for  another 
and  a  larger  edition.  Burns  posted  to  Edinburgh,  her- 
alded and  feted  on  the  way  like  a  hero  of  romance.  A 
winter  in  the  Scotch  capital  followed,  during  which  the 
ploughman- poet  was  petted  and  lionized;  and  another 
winter  during  which  his  great  friends  cooled  toward  him 
as  an  exploited  attraction.  Then  he  went  back  to  Ayr- 
shire, with  an  appointment  as  "gauger"  (inspector  of  the 
liquor  customs)  in  his  pocket,  married  Jean  Armour,  and 
settled  down  to  the  task  of  combining  farming  and  revenue 
service  with  poetry.  His  duties  as  gauger  covered  ten 
parishes,  and  compelled  him  to  ride  two  hundred  miles  a 


270  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

week;  what  was  worse,  they  threw  him  constantly  into 
riotous  company,  where  his  wit  and  eloquence  were  al- 
ways in  uproarious  demand.  His  farm  naturally  went 
to  ruin,  and  he  found  time  for  little  poetry  except  short 
snatches  of  song.  With  the  exception  of  the  "Jolly  Beg- 
gars" and  the  immortal  "Tarn  o'  Shanter,"  Burns  did  no 
more  sustained  work.  But  in  recompense  he  poured  out 
hundreds  of  songs — drinking-songs,  love-songs,  songs  of 
patriotism — some  of  which  are  among  the  eternal  posses- 
sions of  the  race.  Things  went  from  bad  to  worse  with 
him,  and  he  died  in  1796,  at  the  age  of  thirty-seven,  a 
self-defeated  and  embittered  man.  He  saved  others,  him- 
self he  could  not  save.  He  poured  into  the  world  a  cur- 
rent of  feeling,  electrical  and  life-giving.  He  revealed 
and  made  once  more  the  heritage  of  all,  the  fountains  of 
tenderness  and  passion,  of  natural  tears  and  mirth;  foun- 
tains never  sealed  to  the  simple  and  lowly,  who  are  always 
''romantic"  in  any  age  and  under  any  fashion  of  thought. 


CHAPTER   XII 

THE   EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY:   THE   NOVEL 

As  the  drama  was  the  characteristic  and  natural  liter- 
ary expression  of  the  Elizabethan  age,  so  the  novel  has 
been  the  prevailing  type  of  popular  literature 
in  the  last  two  centuries.  For  this  change  The  Novel 
there  have  been  assigned  various  reasons.  In  Drama6 
the  first  place,  it  is  clear  that  the  dramatist 
works  within  limitations.  He  must  put  his  material  be- 
fore the  public  in  a  few  hours  and  on  a  small  stage.  He 
must  make  his  personages  tell  their  story  and  reveal  their 
characters,  without  appearing  in  his  own  person.  The 
novelist,  on  the  contrary,  is  practically  unlimited  in  time, 
space,  or  method.  He  can  assume  omniscience  in  the 
conduct  of  his  story,  revealing  his  characters  by  selections 
from  their  acts,  speeches,  and  thoughts;  even  from  the 
life  which  lies  beneath  their  conscious  thought.  And 
above  all,  he  can  give  his  attitude  toward  life  in  his  own 
authoritative  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  the  events 
which  he  narrates.  Naturally,  therefore,  the  novel  lends 
itself  more  easily  to  the  treatment  of  the  great  mass  of 
interests  and  problems  which  make  up  modern  life. 
Moreover,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  the  drama  depends,  to 
some  extent  at  least,  on  the  theatre.  The  English  reading 
public  in  these  latter  days  has  become  so  extensive  and 
so  scattered  that  it  has  far  outgrown  the  possibility  of 
being  served  by  such  an  institution  as  the  theatre  of 
Shakespeare's  time,  or  even,  let  us  say,  as  the  French 
stage  of  to-day.  Thus  to  the  general  causes  for  the  pre- 
dominance of  the  novel  in  the  modern  world  must  be 
added  this  physical  reason,  which  applies  with  peculiar 
force  to  English  literature. 

271 


272  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

To  give  a  complete  account  of  the  modern  novel  we 
must  go  back  to  the  stories  of  the  Middle  Age.  These 
were  in  general  of  two  kinds,  adapted  to  two 
audiences,  the  nobles  and  the  people.  Of  the 
first  class  were  the  romances  clustering  about 
such  heroes  as  Charlemagne  and  King  Arthur,  and  deal- 
ing with  knightly  adventure,  mystical  religious  experi- 
ence, and  courtly  love.  These  were  told  first  in  verse, 
later  in  prose.  The  Morte  Darthur  of  Sir  Thomas  Malory 
(1470)  is  the  most  comprehensive  example  of  the  knightly 
epic  in  England.  Being  written  for  people  of  leisure  and 
culture,  the  romances  of  chivalry  presented  a  highly 
imaginative,  idealized  view  of  life,  in  which  strength, 
virtue,  and  passion  were  all  of  a  transcendent  and  un- 
natural character.  The  fiction  of  the  common  people  was 
decidedly  more  realistic.  There  were,  first  of  all,  moral 
tales,  called  exempla,  many  of  them  imported  from  the 
Orient,  and  collected  for  the  use  of  the  clergy  in  their 
sermons.  The  stories  of  knighthood  were  in  part  retold, 
often  with  the  purpose  of  exhibiting  in  a  cynical  spirit 
the  coarse  human  motives  underlying  chivalric  achieve- 
ment. A  great  parody  on  chivalric  literature  was  the 
animal  epic  of  Reynard  the  Fox,  in  which  various  animals 
replace  the  knights,  and  the  fox  by  his  cleverness  tri- 
umphs over  strength  and  valor.  This  element  of  trick- 
ery played  a  large  part  in  popular  fiction,  being  the  mo- 
tive of  innumerable  anecdotes  turning  on  sharp  answers 
and  practical  jokes.  Sometimes  the  vices  and  follies  of 
men  were  represented  in  short  tales,  in  prose  or  verse; 
the  hypocrisy  of  the  clergy,  for  example,  was  a  favorite 
subject.  An  idea  of  the  range  of  mediaeval  popular  fic- 
tion can  be  gained  from  Chaucer's  Canterbury  Tales,  or 
from  the  collection  of  stories  made  by  Boccaccio  in  the 
Decameron.  These  prose  stories  were  called  in  Italy 
novelle,  from  which  term  is  derived  our  word  novel.  The 
spirit  of  burlesque  aroused  by  the  contrast  between  the 


THE   NOVEL 


273 


ideals  of  chivalry  and  the  affairs  of  actual  life,  led  in 
Spain  to  the  production  of  a  form  of  story  known  as  the 
picaresque  romance  (see  page  91.)  The  typical  Italian 
novella  and  the  Spanish  rogue  story  resembled  each  other 
in  their  realistic  spirit,  their  emphasis  on  natural  human 
motives,  and  to  some  extent  on  the  manners  of  actual  life. 
They  are  the  source  of  the  realistic  novel  of  to-day,  while 
what  we  call  the  romance  looks  back  rather  to  the  epic  of 
chivalry  for  its  beginning. 

English  fiction  of  the  Renaissance  was  largely  derived 
from  the  sources  just  mentioned.     There  were  great  num- 
bers of. translations  of  the  Italian  novelle  and 
some  translations  of  the  Spanish  rogue  stories.    ^g^sh  f 

,  •  Fiction  of  the 

There  were  romances  founded  on  the  careers  Renaissance, 
of  popular  heroes,  such  as  Robin  Hood  and 
Guy  of  Warwick.  The  first  landmarks  in  English  fiction 
of  the  Renaissance  were  Lyly's  Euphues  and  Sir  Philip 
Sidney's  Arcadia.  The  influence  of  all  these  may  be  seen 
in  the  work  of  Robert  Greene,  Thomas  Lodge,  and 
Thomas  Nashe.  (See  page  91.)  This  literature  existed 
for  the  primary  object  of  entertaining  its  readers,  but  ac- 
cording to  the  standards  of  the  time  it  was  furnished  with 
a  moral  or  useful  purpose,  which  was  in  general  to  teach 
men  to  live  successfully  in  the  world.  These  two  ends 
were  kept  in  view  with  much  adroitness  by  authors  and 
collectors  of  stories.  For  example,  Robert  Greene,  while 
amusing  his  readers  with  accounts  of  criminal  life  in  Lon- 
don, points  out  how  necessary  it  is  for  them  to  learn  of  the 
snares  and  dangers  of  such  life  in  order  to  avoid  them. 

In  the  seventeenth  century  the  English  readers  of  fic- 
tion were  chiefly  supplied  from  France,  where  there  had 
arisen  a  school  of  writers  who  told  at  great     En^sh  Fic. 
length,  and  with  much  sentimental  and  imagi-      tion  in  the 
native  embroidery,  the  stories  of  the  Grand      |ee^ey6nth 
Cyrus   and   other  half-historical  heroes.     Of 
these  tales  the  best  known  are  those  by  Mile.  Scudery. 


274  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

In  their  exaggeration  of  heroism  and  in  their  artificiality 
they  resembled  the  romances  of  chivalry  which  they  suc- 
ceeded, and  in  turn  contributed  to  the  taste  for  the  heroic 
play.  (See  page  210.)  Among  the  people  the  chief  in- 
terest in  the  seventeenth  century  was  the  religious  one; 
naturally,  therefore,  we  find  popular  fiction  of  the  period 
represented  by  the  adaptation  of  the  common  type  of 
story  to  the  religious  life.  Bunyan's  Pilgrim  wanders 
through  the  world  like  the  knight-errant  or  the  Spanish 
rogue,  meeting  adventures.  Like  the  knight  he  has  a 
high  purpose;  like  the  rogue  he  mingles  with  people  of 
every  sort,  and  reflects  in  his  journey  the  common  sights 
and  interests  of  English  country  life.  Almost  as  notable 
a  contribution  to  the  development  of  modern  fiction  as 
The  Pilgrim's  Progress  is  Bunyan's  autobiography,  Grace 
Abounding.  One  of  the  chief  elements  of  the  novel  is 
the  study  of  character,  and  in  this  study  the  novelist  has 
often  found  his  most  genuine  material  in  the  literature  of 
confessions,  among  such  examples  of  personal  analysis 
and  recorded  spiritual  experience,  Bunyan's  account  is 
one  of  the  most  naively  convincing  and  powerfully  ren- 
dered. 

The  real  beginning  of  the  English  novel  took  place  in 
the  eighteenth  century  with  the  work  of  Daniel  Defoe 

(1661-1731).  Defoe,  like  Bunyan,  was  a 
SSoe!  Dissenter,  a  thorough  man  of  the  people,  a 

stranger  to  the  ideals  and  refinements  of  aris- 
tocratic life.  Moreover,  in  an  age  when  the  aim  of  the 
successful  writer  was  to  rise  in  the  world  and  to  gain 
aristocratic  connections,  Defoe  seems  to  have  been  en- 
tirely willing  to  remain  in  his  class,  to  serve  it,  and  to  write 
for  it.  He  began  life  as  a  tradesman,  but  soon  interested 
himself  in  politics,  and  held  various  offices  under  William 
III.  In  the  early  years  of  Queen  Anne's  reign  he  turned 
the  arms  of  the  Tories,  who  were  in  favor  of  a  mild  per- 
secution of  Dissenters,  against  themselves,  by  publishing 


THE   NOVEL 


275 


a  pamphlet,  The  Shortest  Way  with  Dissenters,  in  which 
he  ironically  advised  the  severest  punishments  for  relig- 
ious nonconformity.  With  an  art  which  he  showed 
later  in  his  novels  he  concealed  his  real  personality,  and 
his  work  passed  as  that  of  a  genuine  Tory.  The  trick  was 
discovered,  however,  and  Defoe  was  punished  by  being 
placed  in  the  pillory  and  imprisoned.  He  was  released 
to  enter  the  service  of  the  government  as  a  secret  agent, 
perhaps  as  a  spy,  which  office  he  held  under  different 
ministries.  In  1704  he  founded  a  newspaper,  The  Re- 
view, and  after  its  cessation  in  1713  he  continued  his 
connection  with  the  press.  As  a  clever  journalist  he 
published  the  lives  of  vari6us  people  of  interest  to  the 
public:  of  Peter  the  Great,  for  one;  of  Jonathan  Wild,  a 
notorious  criminal  and  thief- taker,  for  another;  of  Cap- 
tain A  very,  a  notable  pirate,  for  a  third.  His  life  brought 
him  into  contact  with  all  sorts  of  adventurers;  being  of  a 
curious  disposition  and  a  retentive  memory,  he  heard 
their  stories  and  afterward  wrote  them  out.  When  his 
material  failed  he  drew  upon  his  imagination;  but  he  real- 
ized that  he  was  writing  for  people  who  demanded  fact, 
who  perhaps  thought  it  wrong  to  read  fiction,  and  ac- 
cordingly he  tried  to  give  every  appearance  of  reality  to 
his  narratives. 

The  method  by  which  he  worked  over  from  biography 
and  history  into  fiction  is  illustrated  by  The  Journal  of 
Uie  Plague  Year  (1722).  In  this  work  much  <tThg 
of  the  material  is  authentic,  gathered  doubt-  journal  of 
less  from  many  sources;  but  while  a  historian  y^J^8118 
would  have  endeavored  to  base  his  account 
directly  upon  these  various  authorities,  Defoe,  as  a  story- 
teller, presents  all  his  facts  as  the  continuous  experience 
of  an  imaginary  narrator.  So  cleverly  is  this  done  that 
the  personality  of  this  character  comes  to  be  the  most 
authoritative  thing  in  the  book;  we  believe  in  the  horrors 
of  the  plague  because  we  believe  that  the  imaginary  spec- 


276  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

tator  of  them  is  truthful.  In  his  power  thus  to  produce 
a  perfect  illusion  of  reality,  Defoe  anticipates  the  later 
triumphs  of  great  fiction.  Many  writers  have  used  pesti- 
lence as  one  of  the  means  of  awakening  terror  in  their 
readers;  but  Defoe  has  surpassed  them,  simply  because 
he  seems  so  earnestly  intent  on  telling  the  mere  truth, 
with  no  care  for  literary  effect. 

While  working  on  the  border  line  between  biography 
and  fiction,  Defoe  was  attracted  by  the  story  of  a  sailor, 
Alexander  Selkirk,  who  had  been  wrecked  on 

an  island  in  the  Pacinc>  and  had  remained 
there  for  many  years.  This  story  suggested 
The  Surprising  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe,  which  was 
published  in  1719.  Here  again  Defoe  shows  what  a  con- 
temporary described  as  "  the  little  art  he  is  so  truly  mas- 
ter of,  of  forging  a  story  and  imposing  it  on  the  world  for 
truth";  and  here  also  the  reason  for  his  success  is  appar- 
ent. Defoe  is  always  minute  in  his  account  of  events  and 
circumstances,  and  these  circumstances,  although  not  al- 
ways the  most  important,  are  precisely  those  which  the 
character  who  is  telling  the  story  would  be  likely  to 
remember.  In  other  words,  Defoe  is  a  master  of  the  art 
of  taking  and  keeping  the  point  of  view  of  his  hero.  In- 
deed, he  seems  to  abdicate  his  rights  as  an  author;  to 
allow  his  hero  to  possess  him.  He  throws  himself  com- 
pletely into  the  situation  of  Crusoe,  wrecked  on  the  island. 
He  foresees  the  dangers  incident  to  such  a  situation, 
takes  measures  of  precaution  against  them,  indulges  the 
natural  hope  of  escape,  and  makes  the  wonderfully  human 
mistake  of  building  a  boat  too  heavy  for  him  to  launch. 
He  is  absorbed  in  the  trivial  events  of  a  solitary  existence; 
he  is  filled  with  satisfaction  at  his  miniature  conquest  of 
nature,  and  with  horror  at  the  frightful  discovery  of  the 
human  footprint  in  the  sand.  In  fact,  so  utterly  did  he 
merge  himself  in  Crusoe  that,  when  his  work  was  finished, 
he  came  to  see  in  the  struggles  of  the  York  mariner  an 


THE   NOVEL 


277 


allegory  of  his  own  toilsome  and  dangerous  experience  of 
life. 

Crusoe  proved  so  successful  that  Defoe  followed  it  the 
next  year  with  the  Further  Adventures,  and  then  with  the 
Serious  Reflections  of  Robinson  Crusoe.  In 
the  next  few  years  he  also  published  a  series  SSJj£.inor 
of  stories  of  adventure:  Captain  Singleton 
(1720),  a  tale  of  piracy;  Moll  Flanders  (1722),  the  life  of 
a  thief  and  adventuress;  Colonel  Jacque  (1722),  and  ROX-* 
ana  (1724).  These  stories  are  all  picaresque  in  matter 
and  in  form.  The  hero,  who  is  the  narrator,  constitutes 
the  chief  element  of  unity;  the  other  characters  appear 
and  pass  away,  no  attempt  being  made  to  work  them 
into  a  plot.  Defoe  conceals  his  personality  behind  that 
of  his  hero,  as  he  had  done  in  the  case  of  Crusoe;  yet  his 
personal  attitude  toward  life  appears  in  the  purpose  which 
each  tale  clearly  has.  Defoe  was  a  Dissenter;  he  wrote 
for  the  descendants  of  Puritans,  men  in  whom  the  interest 
in  conduct  and  morality  was  strong.  It  is  true,  Puritan- 
ism, in  its  descent  to  the  eighteenth  century,  had  lost  its 
ideal  character.  Defoe's  morality  is  that  of  the  bour- 
geois. He  inculcates  the  utilitarian  virtues;  his  aim  is 
social  usefulness.  Robinson  Crusoe  is  a  manual  of  the 
qualities  that  have  won  the  world  from  barbarism — 
courage,  patience,  ingenuity.  In  the  minor  novels  these 
same  practical  virtues  are  exhibited,  even  in  the  pursuit 
of  evil  ends.  Further,  as  Defoe  takes  pleasure  in  point- 
ing out  in  his  preface  to  Moll  Flanders,  it  is  well  for  good 
people  to  know  the  devices  of  evil  in  order  that  they 
may  be  on  their  guard  against  them.  But  be-  Defoe.s 
yond  this  Defoe  has  a  moral  ideal  to  which  .  Morality, 
he  makes  most  of  his  characters  conform,  by 
regarding  their  lives  as  warnings  and  subjects  of  repen- 
tance. This  side  of  Defoe's  ethics  is  less  sincere  than  the 
other,  and  its  appearance  is  rather  an  artistic  blemish. 
In  the  case  of  Moll  Flanders,  who  has  been  a  great  sin- 


278  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ner,  repentance  seems  inadequate;  in  that  of  poor  Crusoe, 
who  has  done  nothing  worse  than  run  away  from  home, 
it  seems  forced.  Yet  in  both  cases  Defoe  bears  witness 
to  a  prevailing  demand  for  the  moralization  of  literature, 
a  demand  made  by  the  English  middle  class  for  which 
he  wrote,  and  of  which  he  so  eminently  was. 

One  element  of  the  modern  novel  Defoe's  stories  are 
without — they  lack  plot.  Like  the  Spanish  rogue  stories, 
they  are  merely  successions  of  adventures 
Richard-  which  befall  the  same  hero.  The  first  great 
"Pamela."  success  in  constructing  a  story  which  should 
be  guided  throughout  its  course  by  a  single 
motive,  the  love  of  one  person  for  another,  was  Pamela, 
written  by  a  London  printer,  Samuel  Richardson  (1689- 
1761).  Richardson  was  asked  by  a  publisher  to  write  a 
series  of  letters  which  should  serve  as  models  for  the 
correspondence  and  behavior  of  people  in  the  lower  walks 
of  life.  He  did  so;  and,  to  add  interest,  he  wrote  them 
as  the  connected  letters  of  a  young  serving-girl  to  her 
parents,  telling  the  story  of  her  temptation  by  her  mas- 
ter, a  certain  Mr.  B.,  of  her  resistance,  and  of  her  final 
triumph  in  marrying  him.  The  book  appeared  in  1740, 
and  was  so  popular  that  Richardson  wrote  a  sequel,  which 
described  Pamela's  experience  as  wife  in  a  sphere  much 
abov^  that  of  her  birth,  her  lessons  in  behavior  suitable 
to  that  estate,  and  her  plans  for  the  education  of  her 
children.  The  moral  and  social  purposes  of  the  book  are 
therefore  successfully  blended,  though  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  Pamela's  morality  is  of  a  rather  calculating 
type. 

The  success  of  Pamela  encouraged  the  author  to  pro- 
duce a  second  work  of  fiction,  Clarissa  Harlowe,  which 
aPPeared  in  eight  volumes  in  1748.     This  is 
the  story  of  a  young  lady,  Clarissa  Harlowe, 
who  is  at  the  outset  the  unwilling  object  of 
the  attentions  of  a  certain  Lovelace.     A  quarrel  has  oc- 


THE   NOVEL  279 

curred  between  him  and  Clarissa's  brother,  and  to  keep 
Lovelace  from  renewing  the  difficulty  she  continues  to 
communicate  with  him.  Her  relatives,  however,  persist 
in  distrusting  her,  and  to  secure  her  final  separation  from 
Lovelace  they  introduce  a  second  suitor,  an  impossible 
creature  named  Solmes;  and  they  resort  to  such  measures 
of  persecution  to  force  her  to  accept  him  that  she  finally 
decides  to  flee  to  the  protection  of  a  friend.  Unfortu- 
nately, she  accepts  the  assistance  of  Lovelace,  who  kid- 
naps and  ruins  her.  After  many  chapters  of  suffering  she 
dies,  leaving  a  vast  heritage  of  remorse  to  be  divided 
among  her  relatives  and  Lovelace. 

Like  Pamela,  Clarissa  is  told  by  means  of  letters  which 
pass  between  the  different  characters.  Obviously,  this 
method  is  in  its  nature  dramatic;  that  is  to 
say,  the  reader  holds  communication  directly  5Jethod.S°r 
with  the  characters.  In  other  ways  it  is 
clear  that  Richardson  thought  of  the  novel  as  an  elabo- 
rated drama.  He  calls  Clarissa  Harlowe  "a  dramatic 
narrative";  and  he  does  so  very  properly,  for,  as  in  a 
play,  there  is  in  Clarissa  a  definite  catastrophe,  every 
step  toward  which  is  carefully  prepared  for  by  something 
in  the  environment  or  the  characters  of  the  actors.  Rich- 
ardson could  not,  however,  forego  entirely  the  novelist's 
right  to  personal  communication  with  his  audience.  He 
introduced  footnotes  in  which  he  enforced  his  own  view 
of  the  story,  when  he  thought  his  readers  likely  to  go 
astray.  These  comments  were  needed  especially  in  ref- 
erence to  the  two  principal  persons,  whose  characters 
show  a  degree  of  complexity  to  which  the  novel  readers 
of  that  day  were  scarcely  accustomed.  In  the  case  of 
Clarissa  this  complexity  seems  justified;  in  all  her  uncer- 
tainties, scruples,  hesitations,  still  more  in  her  humiliation 
and  anguish,  she  appeals  to  us  as  a  real  woman;  but  Love- 
lace, though  ingeniously  constructed  and  consistent,  is  a 
mechanism. 


280  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

This  discrepancy  is,  after  all,  natural;  for  Richardson 
knew  women  better  than  men.  As  a  youth  he  wrote  love- 
letters  for  girls.  As  a  mature  writer  he 
worke(i  in  close  connection  with  the  female 
part  of  his  audience.  His  circle  of  admirers 
began  with  his  wife  and  a  young  lady  who  was  staying  at 
his  house  while  he  was  composing  Pamela.  It  widened 
with  his  fame,  until  it  included  even  great  ladies  of 
fashion,  who  in  person  or  by  letter  communicated  with 
the  old  printer  about  the  progress  of  his  tales.  They 
petted  him,  flattered  him,  and  debauched  him  with  tea; 
until  the  good  Richardson  lost  himself  in  the  Avalon 
which  they  provided,  and  forgot  the  world  of  action  out- 
side. So  secluded  did  he  become  that  at  last  he  would 
communicate  even  with  the  foreman  of  his  printing-house 
only  by  letter.  Because  of  this  seclusion  Richardson's 
novels  lack  breadth  and  freshness.  They  deal  with  a 
petty  world,  a  world  of  trifles  and  scruples,  of  Puritan 
niceties  of  conscience,  of  feminine  niceties  of  sentiment 
and  casuistries  of  deportment. 

The  seriousness  with  which  Richardson  took  himself  as 
a  novelist  appears  most  markedly  in  his  third  novel,  Sir 
His  Purpose.  Charles  Grandison  (1753),  which  deals  with 
the  love-affair  between  the  hero  and  a  Miss 
Harriet  Byron.  Richardson,  like  Defoe,  was  of  the  mid- 
dle class,  and  distinctly  wrote  for  it.  Two  serious  pre- 
occupations of  the  English  middle  class  at  all  times  have 
been  deportment  and  conscience.  The  first,  as  we  have 
seen,  was  a  social  interest  of  great  importance  in  the 
early  eighteenth  ce'ntury,  when  England  was  learning  the 
lesson  of  civilization.  Richardson  began  his  work  with 
the  humble  design  of  teaching  his  readers  to  write,  but 
his  plan  broadened  until  it  covered  the  essentials  of  the 
art  of  living.  Pamela  lives  a  model  life  for  servants; 
Clarissa  is  perfection  in  a  higher  sphere;  Sir  Charles 
Grandison  is  an  illustration  of  the  adaptation  of  aristo- 
cratic manners  to  middle-class  instincts.  But  in  addition 


THE  NOVEL  28 1 

Richardson's  characters  are  all  involved  in  intricate  ques- 
tions of  conscience.  Clarissa's  course  is  determined  only 
after  elaborate  discussion  of  the  right  and  wrong  of  each 
step.  In  Grandison,  it  is  only  after  the  hero  has  dealt 
with  a  succession  of  difficult  circumstances  arising  from 
the  claims  upon  him  of  his  friend,  his  friend's  children, 
his  sister,  his  ward,  and  his  father's  mistress,  that  he 
yields  to  his  passion  for  Miss  Byron.  Richardson  surely 
did  not  exaggerate  when  he  declared  the  inculcation  of 
virtue  to  be  his  first  object. 

It  was  something  like  disgust  for  Richardson's  moral 
pretensions  that  led  his  contemporary,  Henry  Fielding, 
to  enter  upon  his  career  as  a  novelist.  Field- 
ing was  of  higher  birth  than  Richardson,  his 
father  being  a  soldier  of  some  renown,  and 
his  grandfather  the  son  of  a  peer;  he  had,  too,  a  far  wider 
and  more  varied  experience  of  life.  He  was  born  in  1707, 
was  educated  at  Eton,  and  afterward  went  to  Leyden  to 
study  law.  In  1727  he  returned  to  London,  where  he 
supported  himself  for  a  while  by  writing  plays.  Deprived 
of  his  profession  of  playwright  by  the  restrictions  of  the 
licensing  act  of  1737,  he  betook  himself  again  to  the  study 
of  law,  meanwhile  supporting  his  family  by  miscellaneous 
writing.  His  wife  died  in  1743,  leaving  him  with  two 
children.  He  struggled  on  until  life  was  made  somewhat 
easier  for  him  by  his  appointment  as  police  magistrate  in 
London,  in  which  office  he  was  highly  efficient.  In  1754, 
broken  in  health,  he  left  England  for  Portugal;  he  has  left 
a  pathetic  account  of  this  journey  in  his  Voyage  to  Lis- 
bon. He  died  the  same  year. 

It  was  while  Fielding  was  earning  his  bread  by  various 
literary   ventures    that    Richardson's   Pamela    appeared. 
Struck  by  the  sentimentality  of  the  book,  its 
narrow  view  of  life,  and  the  shallowness  of  its       Andrews." 
ethics,  he  began  to  write  a  burlesque  upon  it, 
in  which  he  subjected  Pamela's  brother,  Joseph  Andrews, 
to  the  same  temptation  from  his  mistress  that  Pamela 


252  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

suffered  from  her  master.  Like  Pamela,  Joseph  resists; 
but  unlike  her  he  is  turned  out-of-doors,  and  is  left  to 
make  his  way  back  to  his  home  in  the  country.  Fielding 
soon  lost  sight  of  his  narrowly  satirical  purpose  in  the 
broader  attempt  to  picture  the  rough  English  life  of  post- 
roads,  inns,  and  country  houses.  He  is  not  careful  of  the 
structure  of  his  story.  The  adventures  of -Joseph  with 
his  companion.  Parson  Adams,  do  not  all  advance  the 
plot;  minor  characters  introduce  digressions,  and  the 
ending  is  merely  a  series  of  happy  accidents.  Yet,  on  the 
other  hand.  Fielding  writes  of  real  men  and  women  with 
.a  precision  that  comes  from  direct  observation.  His  pic- 
tures are  often  caricatures — as,  for  example,  Mrs.  Tow- 
wouse,  the  innkeeper,  and  Trulliber,  the  hog-raising  par- 
son— but  they  are  caricatures  that  tell  the  truth. 

Fielding's  next  novel,  Jonathan  Wild,  was  a  loose  nar- 
rative, suggested  by  the  life  of  the  famous  rascal  whom 
Defoe  had  celebrated,  and  written  to  bur- 
jonesT"  lesque  the  conception  of  greatness  held  by 

ordinary  writers  of  biography.  In  his  last 
two  stories,  however,  Tom  Jones  (1749)  and  Amelia 
(1751),  Fielding  developed  genuine  plots.  The  former 
opens  with  the  discovery  of  the  hero  as  a  new-born  baby 
in  the  house  of  a  virtuous  gentleman,  Mr.  Airworthy. 
Here  he  grows  up  with  Allworthy's  nephew  Blifil,  who 
out  of  jexalousy  ruins  Tom's  reputation  with  his  bene- 
factor, and  gets  him  turned  out  into  the  world.  Mean- 
while Tom  has  fallen  in  love  with  the  daughter  of  a  neigh- 
bor. Miss  Sophia  Western,  who  returns  his  love  in  spite 
of  the  opposition  of  her  father.  Tom  travels  to  London, 
with  many  wayside  adventures;  he  passes,  not  unscathed, 
through  various  temptations;  and  finally,  by  the  dis- 
covery of  the  secret  of  his  birth  and  the  revelation  of 
Blifil's  villainy,  he  is  advanced  to  his  happy  fortune,  the 
favor  of  Airworthy  and  marriage  with  Sophia. 

In  all  this  the  chief  source  of  unity  is  the  persistence  of 


THE   NOVEL  283; 

the  hero  through  a  long  train  of  incidents.  It  is  true,, 
many  of  these  incidents  contribute  to  unravel  the  com- 
plication; and  of  the  many  characters  whom  the  hero- 
gathers  about  him  in  his  progress,  he  holds  a  goodly  num- 
ber to  the  end.  Still,  the  book  is  constructed  in  the  loose 
epic  manner,  with  little  of  the  dramatic  precision  of  form 
which  appears  in  Clarissa.  Moreover,  Fielding,  in  con- 
trast to  Richardson,  believed  that  the  novelist  should 
hold  the  freest,  most  uninterrupted  communication  with 
his  readers;  and  accordingly  he  breaks  his  narrative  by 
what  are,  in  effect,  brief  essays,  giving  his  opinions  on 
the  conduct  both  of  fiction  and  of  life.  With  this  view 
of  the  novel  as  a  literary  form,  Fielding's  successors  in 
England  have  in  the  main  agreed;  and  thus  it  may  be 
said  that  in  structure  Tom  Jones  rather  than  Clarissa  is 
the  typical  English  novel. 

Amelia  is  the  story  of  a  good  wife,  who,  in  spite  of 
temptation,  remains  faithful  to  a  good-natured  but  rather 
light  husband,  Captain  Booth.  The  tempta-  tt  „ 

tion  is  repeated  several  times,  in  almost  the 
same  form,  in  the  course  of  the  book.  The  happy  end- 
ing, by  which  it  appears  that  Amelia  was  really  the  pre- 
ferred daughter  of  her  mother,  and  that  she  has  been 
kept  out  of  her  inheritance  by  the  treachery  of  her  sister, 
is  almost  a  repetition  of  the  Blifil  episode  in  Tom  Jones. 
The  famous  scenes  in  which  Amelia  and  her  children  wait 
in  vain  for  Booth  to  come,  not  only  repeat  each  other, 
but  also  bear  close  resemblance  to  similar  scenes  in  the 
Heartfree  family  in  Jonathan  Wild.  Finally,  Booth  is 
Tom  Jones  grown  older  but  no  wiser,  and  Amelia  is  only 
a  developed  portrait  of  which  Sophia  Western  is  the 
sketch.  In  short,  Amelia  shows  Fielding's  weakness  as 
a  novelist.  He  was  not  copious  in  invention,  either  in 
respect  to  the  outer  or  the  inner  life.  He  was  prima- 
rily an  observer;  his  great  strength  is  in  the  Rubens-like 
fertility  with  which  he  peopled  his  world.  He  saw  men 


284  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  women  from  the  outside,  and  he  was  fascinated  by 
their  appearance.  For  the  refinements  of  the  novelist's 
art,  for  the  problems  of  motive  and  influence,  he  had  lit- 
tle use.  Motives  that  were  not  apparent  he  was  content 
to  leave  unrevealed;  and  he  confined  himself  by  prefer- 
ence to  the  simple,  epic  manner  of  telling  his 
Fielding's  story.  The  forces  which  guide  his  characters 
z^vSst*  are,  for  the  most  part,  natural  human  needs, 
for  it  was  these  that  Fielding  knew  best.  His 
abounding  physical  vigor  was,  in  fact,  the  greatest  of  his 
gifts.  It  furnished  him  with  unusual  keenness  of  sense, 
and  enabled  him  to  apprehend  and  portray  the  primary 
facts  of  life  with  extraordinary  vividness  and  frankness. 
This  physical  keenness  was  the  source  of  Fielding's 
rather  coarse  realism;  a  realism  that  was  in  thorough 
keeping  with  the  sense  of  fact  of  the  age,  and 
Characfer.  which  Fielding  possessed,  as  did  his  contem- 
poraries, Swift  and  Pope,  to  the  exclusion  of 
interest  in  the  spiritual,  the  unworldly.  And  with  Field- 
ing's realism  must  be  connected  his  moral  indifference,  his 
acceptance  of  things  as  they  are.  Of  the  smug,  prudish 
morality  that  the  eighteenth  century  accepted  for  literary 
purposes,  Fielding  would  have  nothing.  He  threw  it 
aside,  and  presented  man  full  length  as  he  found  him. 
Yet  though  he  portrayed  men  with  no  reservations,  he 
never  forgot  that  he  was  one  with  them.  From  this  in- 
born sympathy  comes  his  large,  tolerant  way  of  looking 
at  things,  a  view  of  life  that  often  finds  relief  in  raillery, 
but  never  in  cynicism.  He  laughs,  but  his  laughter  is 
never  inhuman  like  Swift's;  and  it  is  always  ready  to  give 
place  to  tenderness  and  pity.  For  him  the  tragedy  of 
life  lay  in  the  appearance  of  virtue  and  innocence  in  a 
world  of  evil,  cruelty,  and  deception.  In  his  presenta- 
tion of  this  tragedy  Fielding  is  always  direct,  sincere,  and 
simple.  The  scene  in  which  Amelia  prepares  supper  for 
Booth,  and  when  he  does  not  come  puts  aside  the  wine 


THE   NOVEL  285 

• 

untasted  to  save  a  sixpence,  while  her  husband  is  losing 
guineas  at  the  gaming-table,  is  far  more  moving  than  arc 
the  complicated  woes  of  Clarissa.  It  is  this  humanity, 
the  most  essential  quality  of  the  novelist,  that  makes 
Fielding's  work  permanently  engaging  and  powerful. 

It  was  in  human  sympathy  that  Fielding's  successor 
was  most  notably  deficient.     Tobias  Smollett  (1721-1771) 
was  a  Scotchman,  a  physician  who  failed  in 
his  profession  on  account  of  his  irascible  tern-       Smollett's 
per,  and  who  accordingly  took  up  the  prac-       Random." 
tice  of  literature.     His  first  novel  was  Roderick 
Random  (1748),  a  tale  of  adventure/ in  which  he  made 
use  of  much  of  his  own  experience.     He  had  been  sur- 
geon's mate  on  a  man-of-war;  accordingly,  after  describ- 
ing Roderick's  youth  in  Scotland,  he  sends  him  to  sea, 
taking  the  opportunity  to  insert  some  vivid  descriptions 
of  naval  life.     The  hero  participates  in  the  continental 
wars  of  George  II,  visits  Paris,  goes  to  South  America, 
where  he  discovers  a  conveniently  rich  father,  and  returns 
to  England  to  marry  the  waiting  heroine,  Narcissa. 

Roderick  Random  is  merely  a  succession  of  adventures, 
related  by  the  hero.  Of  precisely  the  same  type  is  Smol- 
lett's_next  novel,  Peregrine  Pickle  (1751),  ex- 
cept that  the  author  tells  the  story.  His 
third,  Ferdinand,  Count  Fathom  (1753),  is 
more  elaborate  in  plot,  for  there  are  two  heroes,  Ferdi- 
nand, a  type  of  cruelty  and  mischief,  and  Renaldo,  a 
type  of  colorless  respectability.  Smollett's  last  novel, 
Humphrey  Clinker,  published  in  1771,  after  his  death,  is 
in  many  respects  his  best.  The  element  of  plot  is  slight, 
the  story  being  sustained  chiefly  by  the  course  of  mild 
adventures  attending  the  journeys  of  a  Welsh  family 
through  England  and  Scotland.  These  journeys,  how- 
ever, give  Smollett  an  opportunity  to  describe  men  and 
things;  and  as  a  contemporary  record  and  comment  on 
life  and  manners  the  book  is  of  decided  interest.  More- 


286  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

• 

over,  the  temper  in  which  life  is  presented  in  Humphrey 
Clinker  is  less  harsh  than  in  the  earlier  books.  In  gen- 
eral, however,  Smollett  lacked  humor  and  geniality.  Fun 
of  a  ferocious  sort,  cruel  practical  jokes,  abound  among 
his  incidents,  making  us  feel  that  the  spirit  which  could 
find  pleasure  in  them  must  have  been  a  savage  one. 
Furthermore,  since  such  incidents  frequently  have  no 
connection  with  the  plot,  and  are  introduced  for  their 
own  sake,  they  must  be  set  down  as  gratuitously  unpleas- 
ant. Smollett's  early  heroes  are  cruel  and  passionate, 
but  otherwise  colorless,  and  always  unsympathetic.  His 
heroines  are  mere  dolls.  His  best  characters  are  his 
humors,  men  and  women  who  stand  each  for  a  single 
quality  or  mannerism,  and  who  respond  to  every  stimulus 
in  precisely  the  same  way,  like  figures  in  a  comic  opera. 
Among  the  best  of  these  humors  are  the  characters  \\ 
Humphrey  Clinker — Matthew  Bramble,  the  irascible 
Welsh  misanthropist,  his  sister  Tabitha,  Win  Jenkins, 
the  maid,  who  exhausts  the  possibilities  of  fun  in  English 
misspelling — and  the  sailor  characters,  Admiral  Trunnion 
in  Peregrine  Pickle,  Bowling  and  Pipes  in  Roderick  Ran* 
dom.  Smollett's  chief  contribution  to  the  novel  was  his 
enlargement  of  its  area,  and  the  introduction  of  at  least 
one  special  interest,  the  sea,  as  furnishing  special  types 
of  character  and  incident. 

It  is  possible  to  classify  the  novels  thus  far  mentioned 
according  as  they  advance  beyond,  or  revert  to,  the  sim- 
ple  bi°SraPhic  storv>  in  which  the  element  of 
unitY  is  the  persistence  of  the  hero.  We  next 
come  to  a  book  in  which  even  this  element  of 
structure  is  lacking,  which  only  by  an  extension  of  the 
term  can  be  called  a  novel  at  all.  The  first  two  volumes 
of  The  Life  and  Adventures  of  Tristram  Shandy  appeared 
in  1760.  The  author,  a  clergyman,  Laurence  Sterne 
fofiS-ijte),  began  it,  as  he  says,  "with  no  clear  idea  of 
what  it  was  to  turn  out,  only  a  design  of  shocking  people 


THE  NOVEL  287 

and  amusing  myself."  This  ill-regulated  book  was  a 
product  of  Sterne's  ill-regulated  existence.  His  father 
was  a  petty  officer  in  the  army,  and  he  himself,  born  in 
barracks,  spent  his  sickly  youth  in  moving  from  one 
military  station  to  another.  He  was  sent  to  Cambridge, 
and  thence  drifted  into  the  church,  obtaining  a  small  liv- 
iag  in  Yorkshire,  where,  he  says,  "books,  fiddling,  paint- 
ing, and  shooting  were  my  chief  amusements."  Tristram 
Shandy  made  him  famous.  He  was  courted  and  flattered 
in  London,  promoted  in  'the  church,  and  well  received  at 
Paris,  for  Shandy  was  an  international  success.  Mean- 
while he  continued  his  book,  putting  into  it  material  of 
any  sort  which  he  happened  to  have  on  hand.  His  health 
( ailing,  he  spent  a  year  in  southern  France.  Part  of  the 
experiences  of  his  journey  he  turned  into  the  seventh  vol- 
i  ime  of  Shandy,  part  he  saved  for  a  book  of  travels  called 
The  Sentimental  Journey,  of  which  two  volumes  appeared 
vn  1768,  just  before  his  death. 

Tristram  Shandy  is  not  a  novel  in  the  proper  sense  of 
!he  word.  Elements  of  the  novel  it  has,  characters  and 
i  ncidents,  but  these  are  not  bound  together 
)nto  a  coherent  story.  The  book  is  without 
plan;  without  beginning,  progress,  or  end.  In 
the  fourth  volume  the  hero  laments  that  though  he  is  a 
year  older  than  when  he  began  to  write,  he  has  not  got 
beyond  his  first  day's  life.  The  author  shifts  arbitrarily 
from  one  character  to  another,  begins  conversations  in 
the  middle,  interrupts  them  with  little  essays  full  of  odd 
^earning,  prepares  for  stories  which  are  never  told  and 
->cenes  between  his  characters  which  are  never  acted.  He 
introduces  a  new  character,  the  Widow  Wadman,  with 
whom  Tristram's  Uncle  Toby  falls  in  love,  by  a  blank 
oage,  on  which  the  reader  can  write  his  own  description. 
The  style  is  given  over  to  mannerism,  abounds  in  trick 
and  innuendo,  and  has  none  of  the  formal  regularity 
svhich  had  marked  written  prose  since  the  time  of  Dry- 


288  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

den;  but  is  full  of  the  suggest! veness,  the  half-lights,  of 
brilliant  talk.  Like  Sterne's  life,  the  book  is  an  exaltation 
of  whim.  In  his  life  and  in  his  art  he  was  without  any 
sense  of  propriety,  without  respect  for  the  conventions 
which  the  eighteenth  century  was  so  much  interested  in 
establishing.  His  moral  tone  is  that  of  the  Restoration; 
his  style  reminds  one  of  the  early  seventeenth  century. 
Altogether  he  represents  a  reaction  from  the  rigid  stand- 
ards, moral  and  artistic,  of  Addison  and  Richardson. 

Writing  thus  directly  from  his  temperament,  at  the 
suggestion  of  his  moods,  Sterne  is  curiously  subjective. 
For  example,  he  treats  passion,  not  because 
it  exists  as  a  cardinal  fact  of  life,  but  because 
mentaiism.  he  can  draw  from  it  a  stimulus  for  himself 
and  his  readers.  His  humor,  too,  arises  not 
from  a  broad  vision  of  the  world  as  comedy,  but  from  a 
personal  sense  of  the  incongruous  suggestions  that  hang 
about  simple,  commonplace,  or  even  tragic  circumstances. 
He  sits  down  to  weep  beside  the  poor  insane  Maria,  who 
stares  alternately  at  him  and  at  her  goat.  "Do  you  see 
any  resemblance?"  he  asks.  Again,  his  pathos  is  not  the 
sympathy  of  the  strong  man  who  weeps  because  he  must. 
His  tears  are  not  wrung  from  him  by  the  tragedy  of  ex- 
istence; on  the  contrary,  he  goes  about  seeking  occasion 
for  feeling.  He  is  thus  the  chief  of  sentimentalists,  of 
those  who  write  not  to  picture  the  world  as  it  is,  but  to 
draw  from  it  suggestions  for  certain  moods  and  feelings. 
This  attitude,  which  became  for  a  time  a  leading  fashion 
in  literature,  found  its  model  largely  in  Tristram  Shandy. 
But  there  is  a  stronger  reason  than  this  for  Sterne's 
influence.  He  has  a  wonderful  power  of  imparting  genu- 
ffis  ine  human  quality  to  his  characters,  through 

Humanity.       a^  the  eccentricities  of  their  lives  and  sur- 
roundings.    He  makes  no  use  of  the  ordinary 
material  of  the  novelist— of  men's  desires,  passions,  polit- 
ical or  religious  beliefs,  social  relations,  success  or  failure. 


THE  NOVEL  289 

His  characters  live  in  a  world  of  their  own.  Tristram's 
father  is  absorbed  in  curious  learning  and  speculation; 
his  Uncle  Toby  is  occupied  in  acting  out  in  his  gar- 
den, with  the  aid  of  his  servant,  Corporal  Trim,  the 
battles  and  sieges  that  he  has  seen.  And  yet  these  char- 
acters live — live  by  virtue  of  the  most  adroit  suggestion 
of  humanity,  in  their  speech,  their  appearance,  their  ges- 
tures and  attitudes.  With  his  usual  self-consciousness 
Sterne  calls  attention  to  his  method,  a  method  new  in 
eighteenth-century  literature.  "You  perceive,"  he  says, 
"that  the  drawing  of  my  Uncle  Toby's  character  went 
on  gently  all  the  time — not  the  great  contours  of  it — that 
was  impossible — but  some  familiar  strokes  and  faint 
designations  of  it  were  here  and  there  touched  on  as  we 
went  along,  so  that  you  are  much  better  acquainted  with 
my  Uncle  Toby  now  than  you  were  before."  By  this 
method  Sterne  gives  to  his  characters  an  abiding  reality 
and  charm.  They  have,  with  the  characters  of  Cervantes 
and  Shakespeare,  with  Quixote  and  Falstaff,  the  note  of 
highest  artistic  distinction.  They  are  among  the  very 
few  " creations"  of  literature. 

Sterne's  habit  of  playing  directly  upon  the  sensibility 
of  his  readers  was  freely  imitated.     The  most  notable  in- 
stance of  such  imitation  is  found  in  The  Man 
of    Feeling     (1771)     by    Henry    Mackenzie.     *?££***'* 
This  book  shows  also  the  influence  of  Sterne's     Feeling." 
loose   structure,    though  Mackenzie   explains 
the  breaks  in  his  story  by  the   theory  of  a  mutilated 
manuscript.     The  hero's  faculty  for  finding  tragedy  in 
the  lot  of  man,  and  his  morbid  emotion  over  it,  connect 
the  book  with  the  "graveyard  poetry"  of  the  precursors 
of  the  Romantic  Movement. 

Signs  of  a  possibly  conscious  reaction  toward  a  more 
wholesome  view  of  life  than  Sterne's  are  to  be  found  in 
a  book  as  famous  as  Tristram  Shandy < — Oliver  Goldsmith's 
Vicar  of  Wakefield  (1766).  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield  is  a 


2QO  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

perfect  expression  of  homely  English  sentiment.     That 
sentiment  naturally  gathers  about  the  family  life.     The 

Vicar  and  his  wife  and  children  are  thrown 
Goldsmith's  jnto  poverty.  Worse  misfortune  comes  in 
wSSJeW."  the  flight  of  the  elder  daughter,  Olivia,  who 

is  lured  away  by  an  unworthy  lover;  in  the 
burning  of  their  poor  house;  in  the  imprisonment  of  the 
father  for  debt.  But  through  all  these  troubles  shines 
the  Vicar's  love  for  his  family  and  his  confidence  in  life; 
and  at  the  end  his  faith  in  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds 
emerges  triumphant.  The  Vicar  is,  it  is  true,  the  only 
character  in  the  book.  The  Vicar's  wife  and  children; 
young  Squire  Thornhill,  and  his  uncle,  Sir  William  Thorn- 
hill,  who  wanders  through  the  book  in  an  impossible 
incognito;  the  convenient  Jenkinson,  who  has  craftily 
made  of  Olivia's  mock  marriage  a  real  one — all  these  are 
shadowy  forms  of  which  we  get  but  glimpses  as  they 
cross  the  light  of  the  Vicar's  steady  personality.  The 
Vicar  animates  not  only  the  characters  but  the  spirit 
and  purpose  of  the  book.  Goldsmith  is  not  a  realist. 
To  him,  as  to  Sterne,  the  positivism  of  the  early  century, 
with  its  demand  for  the  presentation  of  life  as  it  is,  made 
no  appeal.  His  world  is  an  ideal  one.  Troubles  and 
disasters  accumulate  like  threatening  clouds,  but  only  to 
resolve  themselves  into  beneficent  showers.  Suffering  is 
not  a  problem ;  it  is  merely  an  artistic  device  to  make  the 
world  seem  more  beautiful.  Evil  loses  its  essential  qual- 
ity; Olivia  is  married  to  a  rake  who  does  not  love  her,  but 
even  this  we  accept  confidently  as  a  part  of  the  happy 
outcome,  so  contagious  is  Goldsmith's  optimism. 

Goldsmith  used  one  element  of  the  Arcadian  romance, 
and  made  of  it  a  distinct  contribution  to  the  modern 

novel.  The  element  of  outdoor  scene  had 
?cen^Se  been  largely  neglected  by  his  predecessors. 

Richardson  had  shown  care  and  skill  in  the 
arrangement  of  his  interiors;  Fielding  had  given  ».  S**- 


THE   NOVEL  2QI 

set  pieces  of  description,  showing  the  preference  of  eight- 
eenth-century taste  for  artificial  over  natural  beauty; 
but  Goldsmith  pictured  nature  with  real  feeling  for  it. 
He  made  it,  especially  in  the  early  idyllic  scenes  of  his 
novel,  a  happy  reinforcement  of  his  theme  of  domestic 
bliss  and  tranquillity;  and  it  is,  throughout  the  book,  a 
symbol  of  the  eternal  goodness  of  the  world,  another 
reason  for  putting  trust  in  life. 

With  the  possible  exception  of  lyric  poetry,  the  novel 
is  the  form  of  literature  which  has  been  most  successfully 
practised  by  women.  In  the  period  before  Miss  Bur] 
Defoe,  the  most  popular  writers  of  romance 
were  women — Mrs.  Behn  and  Mrs.  Manley.  Miss  Sarah 
Fielding,  sister  of  the  novelist,  wrote  a  story,  David 
Simple,  which  both  Richardson  and  Fielding  praised. 
Later  in  the  century  the  line  of  realists,  broken  by  Sterne 
and  Goldsmith,  was  continued  by  Miss  Fanny  Burney 
(1752-1840),  whose  first  story,  Evelina,  appeared  in  1778. 
Doctor  Johnson,  who  was  her  father's  friend,  liked  the 
book,  and  his  support  had  much  to  do  with  its  immediate 
success,  though  his  influence  on  the  style  of  her  later  books 
cannot  be  called  happy.  With  an  achieved  literary  repu- 
tation, Miss  Burney,  who  had  been  glad  to  get  twenty 
pounds  for  Evelina,  sold  her  second  book,  Cecilia  (1782), 
for  £250.  Soon  after  this  she  became  a  maid  of  honor 
to  Queen  Charlotte;  and  after  escaping  from  the  intol- 
erable constraints  of  this  situation  she  married  General 
D'Arblay,  by  whose  name  she  is  usually  known.  At  long 
intervals  she  followed  her  early  works  with  two  others, 
which  are  how  forgotten,  but  her  Diary  remains  one  of 
the  important  documents  of  the  time. 

Evelina  is  the  story  of  a  young  girl's  introduction  to 
the  great  world,  told  chiefly  by  herself  in  letters  to  her 
guardian.  Her  path  is  beset  by  rival  suitors, 

i  i  11-11  i_  i.  Her  novels. 

and  made  doubtful  by  a  mystery  about  ner 

own  birth;  but  her  course  is  guided  steadily  by  conscience 


2Q2  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

and  propriety.  Indeed,  both  Evelina  and  Cecilia  are  of 
the  family  of  Clarissa:  both  are  a  bit  prudish,  overscru- 
pulous, oversensitive.  The  other  characters  are  men 
and  women  drawn  from  nature,  as  Macaulay  says,  but 
not  from  life,  each  being  developed  in  accordance  with  a 
single  dominant  passion  or  peculiarity.  Like  her  model, 
Richardson,  Miss  Burney  wrote  to  correct  the  evils  of 
the  time.  Her  minor  characters  were  intended  to  make 
various  faults  and  affectations  contemptible  or  ridiculous, 
through  an  extravagant  presentation  of  them.  But  as 
the  element  of  truth  is  largely  present  in  successful 
satire,  it  follows  that  Miss  Burney's  novels  give  us  fair 
pictures  of  the  age  in  which  she  lived.  In  Evelina  we  see 
reflected  the  uncouthness  of  the  middle  classes,  the  boor- 
ishness  of  their  amusements,  and  their  fondness  for  prac- 
tical jokes;  and  in  Cecilia  the  studies  of  contemporary 
life  are  still  more  detailed.  Altogether  Miss  Burney's 
work  will  live,  if  not  by  its  intrinsic  interest,  at  least  as 
a  document  of  importance  in  the  social  history  of  Eng- 
land. 

The  novel  of  the  eighteenth  century  from  Defoe  to 
Miss  Burney  was,  on  the  whole,  conceived  on  lines  which 
made  it  acceptable  to  the  positive,  matter- 
Romantic  of-fact  temperament  of  the  age.  The  novel- 
Movement,  ists  endeavored  to  deal  with  things  as  they 
were,  though  they  usually  claimed  the  pur- 
pose of  making  them  better.  Toward  the  close  of  the 
century,  however,  the  novel  felt  the  stimulus  of  a  new 
spiritual  force,  the  Romantic  Movement. 

As  has  already  been  noted,  the  Romantic  Movement 
showed  its  influence  in  a  return  to  nature,  in  absorption 
in  the  remote  in  time  and  space  and  a  revelling  in  the 
attendant  emotions  of  awe  and  wonder,  in  emphasis  on 
the  individual,  however  humble,  and  his  defense  against 
society.  All  of  these  forces  are  reflected  in  fiction  of  the 
period.  The  new  interest  in  nature  made  scene  an  im- 


THE   NOVEL 


293 


portant  element  in  the  novel;  the  interest  in  the  past 
brought  into  being  a  new  type  of  fiction,  the  gothic,  the 
ancestor  of  the  historical  novel;  the  interest  in  the  indi- 
vidual defined  a  great  class  of  books  as  pre-eminently 
novels  with  a  purpose.  Accordingly,  therefore,  we  find 
at  the  close  of  the  century  three  types  of  fiction.  In 
addition  to  the  realistic  novel,  which  dealt  with  social 
life  and  manners,  there  was  the  romance,  which  repre- 
sented the  purely  emotional  interest  in  nature  and  in  the 
past,  and  the  humanitarian  novel,  which  seriously  under- 
took to  right  the  wrongs  sustained  by  the  individual  at 
the  hands  of  society.  These  three  objects,  to  paint  b'fe, 
to  escape  from  life,  and  to  make  life  better,  have  defined 
three  schools,  the  realists,  the  romancers,  and  the  mis- 
sionaries, which  have  continued,  with  innumerable  cross 
divisions,  until  the  present  time. 

The  long  list  of  romances  of  the  period  begins  with 
The  Castle  of  Otranto,  published  as  early  as  1764.  It  was 
the  work  of  Horace  Walpole  (1717-1797), 
one  of  the  leaders  of  that  fashion  which,  in  ^plp^}e'sf 
its  preference  for  the  grotesque  and  barbarous  otranto." 
instead  of  the  classically  simple  and  civilized, 
was  called  "gothic."  In  The  Castle  of  Otranto  he  tried  to 
paint  the  domestic  life  and  manners  of  the  feudal  period, 
"as  agitated  by  the  action  of  supernatural  machinery 
such  as  the  superstition  of  the  time  might  have  accepted." 
With  this  excuse  for  the  introduction  of  supernatural  ele- 
ments, no  explanation  of  them  by  rational  causes  is 
needed,  and  none  is  attempted.  A  portrait  steps  from 
its  panel  and  walks  abroad,  a  statue  sheds  blood,  a  hel- 
met of  gigantic  size  crashes  down  into  the  courtyard, 
and  gives  symbolical  accompaniment  to  the  action  of  the 
story  by  dreadfully  waving  its  plumes,  all  without  the 
least  apology  from  the  author.  His  only  effort  is  to  give 
an  air  of  reality  to  such  impossibilities  by  making  his 
characters  natural,  and  by  painting  the  manners  of  the 


294  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

time  faithfully.  In  neither  attempt  was  he  highly  suc- 
cessful. That  he  did  give  his  readers  a  genuine  attack 
of  the  horrors,  however,  is  proved  by  excellent  testimony, 
for  example,  that  of  his  friend,  Thomas  Gray.  For  the 
rest,  Walpole  gave  to  the  gothic  romance  the  elements  on 
which  it  was  to  thrive  for  a  generation  to  come — a  hero 
sullied  by  unmentionable  crimes,  several  persecuted  hero- 
ines, a  castle  with  secret  passages  and  haunted  rooms, 
and  a  plentiful  sprinkling  of  supernatural  terrors. 

Another  book  of  importance  in  the  development  of 
romantic  fiction  is  The  History  of  the  Caliph  Vathek 
(1784),  written  by  William  Beckford  (1759-1844).  This 
tale  added  to  the  attractions  of  remote  time  those 
of  a  distant  and  marvellous  land;  it  substituted  for  the 
creations  of  mediaeval  superstition  the  mys- 
teries  °*  oriental  necromancy;  and  it  spiced 
the  whole  with  a  dash  of  eastern  voluptuous- 
ness. Gothic  romances  were  also  produced  by  Matthew 
Gregory  Lewis  (1775-1818),  whose  Monk  (1795)  was  the 
most  popular  book  of  its  time,  and  whose  Bravo  of  Venice 
(1804)  has  for  its  hero  a  distinct  precursor  of  the  Byronic 
type,  an  individual  developed  into  a  quite  transcendent 
personality  by  feeding  on  his  wrongs  and  crimes. 

The  most  successful  producer  of  gothic  stories  was  Mrs. 
Anne  Rad cliff e  (1764-1823),  who  in  the  last  decade  of 
the  century  wrote  five  elaborate  romances, 
Radciiffe  ^e  mos^  famous  being  The  Mysteries  of 
Udolpho  (1794)  and  The  Italian  (1797). 
These  have  the  faults  and  virtues  of  their  type.  They 
abound  in  mysterious  incident,  skilfully  used;  but  they 
show  an  increasing  tendency  toward  finding  a  rational 
explanation  for  apparently  supernatural  occurrences.  In 
plot  they  are  carefully  constructed  to  keep  the  reader 
guessing  as  to  which  of  several  possible  explanations  is 
the  true  one.  They  are  decorated  with  elaborate  set 
pieces  of  description,  involving  the  romantic  elements  of 


THE   NOVEL  295 

Italian  landscape,  as  treated  by  the  painters  Claude  or 
Salvator  Rosa;  but  there  is  no  accuracy  in  the  local  color, 
which  is  lavishly  used,  and  no  historical  truth  in  the 
representation  of  manners  and  institutions  of  the  past. 
The  characters  are  either  extravagantly  false  or  mildly 
conventional.  Of  Elena,  in  The  Italian,  we  are  told  that 
"her  features  were  of  the  Greek  outline,  and  though  they 
expressed  the  tranquillity  of  an  elegant  mind,  her  dark 
blue  eyes  sparkled  with  intelligence."  Beyond  this  the 
stereotyped  formula  can  hardly  go. 

Although  Walpole  in  his  preface  to  The  Castle  of  Otranto 
points  a  moral  for  his  readers,  the  gothic  romance  is 
frankly  without  any  purpose  save  that  of 
amusing.  A  far  more  strenuous  development 
of  the  novel  was  going  on  at  the  hands  of  the 
group  of  revolutionary  romanticists,  of  whom  William 
Godwin  (1756-1836)  was  the  chief.  With  them  the  novel 
became  a  tract;  it  was  put  out  simply  as  propaganda. 
The  plot  was  arranged,  and  the  characters  were  drawn, 
to  expose  a  social  evil  or  to  show  its  remedy.  Naturally, 
such  books  subordinated  art  to  purpose,  and  for  that 
reason  few  of  them  are  remembered.  A  special  class  of 
such  reforming  novels  was  devoted  to  the  bringing  up 
of  youth.  This  had  been  a  leading  theme  in  English 
prose  literature  from  the  time  of  the  Renaissance,  but 
whereas  the  early  systems  of  education  had  been  based 
on  the  study  of  the  classics,  as  fitting  a  boy  to  take  his 
proper  place  in  formal  society,  the  new  education  em- 
phasized the  place  of  nature  and  experiment  in  the  child's 
development.  In  this  "  re  turn  to  nature"  the  influence 
of  the  story  Entile  (1762)  by  the  French  philosopher 
Rousseau  counted  for  much.  A  favorite  plan  of  novelists 
devoted  to  this  form  of  propaganda  was  to  set  in  opposi- 
tion two  children,  one  brought  up  in  the  conventions  of 
society,  and  the  other  in  the  freedom  of  nature,  and 
show  the  advantage  of  the  latter  at  all  points.  The  chief 


296  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

of  these  educational  novels  are  The  Fool  of  Quality  (1766) 
by  Henry  Brooke.  Sandford  and  Merlon  (1783-1789)  by 
Thomas  Day,  and  Nature  and  Art  (1796)  by  Elizabeth 
Inchbald. 

Many  other  aspects  of  society  were  brought  under  crit- 
icism by  the  novelists  in  the  period  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution, including  government,  marriage,  private  property. 
The  strongest  book  of  this  class  was  William  Godwin's 
Caleb  Williams  (1794).  Godwin  was  one  of  the  most 

earnest  supporters  in  England  of  the  French 
Godwin's  Revolution.  He  wrote  Caleb  Williams  as  a 
Williams."  tract  against  the  British  Constitution  and  the 

ideals  of  aristocratic  society,  which  Burke 
fought  so  hard  to  maintain.  The  real  hero,  Falkland, 
under  great  provocation  has  committed  a  murder,  and 
in  obedience  to  the  false  god  of  kis  class,  Reputation,  he 
has  allowed  a  poor  peasant  to  suffer  the  penalty  for  it. 
By,  accident  his  secretary,  Caleb  Williams,  becomes  pos- 
sessed of  the  secret,  and  in  self-preservation  Falkland 
feels  bound  to  crush  him.  The  author  gives  a  forcible 
account  of  the  way  in  which  an  aristocrat  like  Falkland 
can  use  the  forces  of  society  and  law  against  an  individual 
of  a  lower  class;  and  he  presents  movingly  the  sufferings 
of  such  an  individual  under  this  persecution.  But  more 
moving  still  is  the  picture  of  the  ruin  of  a  benevolent  and 
elevated  character  by  the  possession  of  aristocratic  power, 
and  by  subjection  to  aristocratic  prejudices.  The  villain 
in  the  book  is  chivalry,  and  Falkland,  even  more  than 
Williams,  is  its  victim. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE    NINETEENTH    CENTURY:    THE    TRIUMPH   OF 
ROMANTICISM 


THE  Romantic  Movement,  the  beginnings  of  which  have 
been  traced  in  the  preceding  chapter,  was  by  no  means 
confined  to  literature.  In  England  the  relig- 
ious revival  under  John  Wesley,  in  Germany 
the  new  philosophy  put  forth  by  Emanuel 
Kant,  in  France  the  immense  social  upheaval 
of  the  French  Revolution,  all  were  symptoms,  early  or 
late,  of  the  same  great  influence  working  for  liberation. 
The  French  Revolution  brought  to  Europe  the  hope  of  po- 
litical freedom  and  social  reconstruction,  and  though  the 
hope  was  disappointed  in  the  accession  to  power  of  Napo- 
leon, its  place  was  taken  by  the  enthusiasm  of  the  struggle 
of  the  nations  against  him  in  which  England  took  the  chief 
part.  The  first  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  were 
marked  by  the  greatest  national  crisis  which  England  had 
experienced  since  the  days  of  Elizabeth.  As  then  the 
country  was  confronted  by  Spain,  under  Philip  II,  seeking 
to  become  a  world-power,  and  to  impose  its  religious  ideals 
on  Europe;  so  at  the  threshold  of  the  nineteenth  century 
she  found  herself  face  to  face  with  France  under  Napoleon, 
seeking  to  gain  a  similar  leadership  and  to  impose  a  world- 
system.  As  the  struggle  with  Spain  led  to  an  extraordi- 
nary outburst  of  patriotism,  so  did  the  war  with  Napo- 
leon; and  the  apex  of  national  glory  reached  in  the  de- 
struction of  the  Armada  was  touched  again  at  Trafalgar 
and  Waterloo.  And  in  both  cases  the  falling  off  was  rapid. 
The  victory  of  Europe  over  Napoleon  was  attended  by  an 
attempt  at  political  reaction  which  threatened  to  undo 
297 


298  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

all  that  the  French  Revolution  had  accomplished  for  the 
rights  of  man.  Accordingly,  we  must  divide  the  first 
third  of  the  nineteenth  century  into  two  periods:  one  of 
enthusiasm,  characterized  by  the  work  of  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  and  Scott;  and  one  of  disillusionment  and  re- 
volt, of  which  the  younger  group  of  romanticists,  Byron, 
Shelley,  and  Keats,  were  in  various  ways  typical. 

The  Romantic  Movement  has  already  been  defined  as 
an  escape  of  the  individual  from   the  conventional,  a 
"return  to  nature,"  a  welcoming  back  into  life 
Double  of  au  that  was  spontaneous  and  sincere;  a 

Movement  *  reasscrtion  of  the  right  of  man  to  indulge  all 
illustrated  by  his  spiritual  instincts,  even  the  wildest  and 

Coleridge  and  ,         _,.  .  .  „ 

Wordsworth,  most  wayward.  This  reassertion  naturally 
took  two  directions:  one  outward,  toward 
whatever  was  remote  and  unusual,  one  inward,  into  the 
heart  of  common  things,  which,  when  looked  at  closely, 
were  found  to  be  full  of  new  meanings.  These  two  im- 
pulses found  expression  in  the  work  of  the  two  poets  in 
whom  the  English  Romantic  Movement  first  became  con- 
scious of  its  real  aims — Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  (1772— 
1834)  and  William  Wordsworth  (1770-1850).  A  happy 
chance  brought  these  two  poets  together  in  the  impres- 
sionable period  of  their  young  manhood,  when  Coleridge 
was  twenty-five  and  Wordsworth  only  two  years  older. 
Both  had  felt  the  storm  and  stress  of  the  revolutionary 
age.  Each  brought  to  the  other  just  that  kind  of  stimulus 
needed  to  kindle  his  mind  to  creative  activity;  and  to- 
gether they  gathered  the  diffused  and  uncertain  rays  of 
the  new  poetic  illumination  into  an  orb  of  steady  splendor. 
In  them  the  new  poetry  first  found  an  adequate  and  un- 
mistakable voice;  and  the  little  volume  called  Lyrical  Bal- 
lads, which  they  published  together  in  1798,  shows  the  two 
impulses  of  the  new  poetry  in  full  play.  Coleridge's  con- 
tributions treat  mysterious,  supernatural  subjects  in  such 
a  way  as  to  give  to  them  an  unparalleled  illusion  of  real- 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  299 

ity;  Wordsworth's  treat  simple,  every-day  themes  of  na- 
ture and  human  life  in  such  a  way  as  to  reveal  in  them 
unsuspected  elements  of  mystery  and  awe. 

Coleridge  was  born  at  Ottery  Saint  Mary's,  Devonshire, 
in  1772.  He  had  a  precocious  boyhood  as  a  "blue-coat" 
at  Christ's  Hospital,  the  famous  charity 
school  in  London.  While  at  Cambridge  he  coi'eridgl!  °f 
plunged,  with  his  friend  Robert  Southey, 
then  a  student  at  Oxford,  into  the  generous  enthusiasms 
aroused  by  the  French  Revolution.  After  graduation  the 
two  young  idealists,  in  their  ardor  for  social  reform,  con- 
ceived a  grand  scheme  of  "pantisocracy,"  which  they 
dreamed  of  realizing  in  the  shape  of  a  Utopian  community 
to  be  established  across  the  ocean,  on  the  banks  of  the 
Susquehanna.  Preliminary  to  emigration  Coleridge  pub- 
lished a  volume  of  juvenile  verse,  and  married;  by  1797 
he  had  a  young  family  on  his  hands,  and  had  exchanged 
pantisocracy  for  a  tiny  cottage  in  the  village  of  Nether 
Stowey,  in  the  Quantock  hills.  In  1797  Wordsworth,  to- 
gether with  his  wonderful  sister  Dorothy,  moved  to  Al- 
foxden,  in  order  to  be  near  Coleridge,  whom  he  had  met 
a  year  or  two  before.  To  Wordsworth  the  companionship 
meant  much;  to  Coleridge  it  meant  everything.  Under 
the  bracing  influence  of  Wordsworth's  hardy,  original 
mind,  supplemented  by  the  quick  sympathy  and  sugges- 
itiveness  of  Dorothy,  Coleridge  shot  up  suddenly  into  full 
poetic  stature.  In  little  more  than  a  year  (1797-1798) 
he  wrote  all  his  greatest  poems,  "Genevieve,"  "The  Dark 
Ladie,"  "Kubla  Khan,"  "The  Ancient  Mariner,"  and  the 
first  part  of  "Christabel." 

The  rest  of  Coleridge's  life,  though  he  wrote  a  good 
deal  of  verse,  has  little  importance  in  the  history  of 
poetry.  He  made  a  trip,  in  the  Wordsworths' 
company,  to  Germany,  and  there  became  ab-  Life 
sorbed  in  the  philosophy  of  Kant.  So  far  as 
his  later  life  had  any  definite  purpose,  it  was  spent  in 


300  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

interpreting  the  principles  of  this  philosophy  to  his  coun- 
trymen. His  bondage  to  the  opium  habit,  added  to  an 
inherent  weakness  of  will,  made  his  life  a  heartrending 
succession  of  half-attempts  and  whole  failures.  He 
planned  many  books,  and  partly  executed  a  few;  but  his 
chief  influence  was  exerted  in  talk  with  his  friends,  and 
with  those  young  men  who,  as  his  reputation  for  tran- 
scendental wisdom  increased,  resorted  to  him  as  to  an 
oracle  of  hope  and  faith,  in  the  years  which  followed  the 
failure  of  the  French  Revolution.  By  consent  of  all  who 
heard  him  Coleridge  was  one  of  the  most  wonderful 
talkers  that  ever  lived.  His  verse,  fragmentary  and  of 
small  bulk  though  it  is,  gives  him  rank  as  one  of  the 
world's  great  poets. 

As  has  been  said  above,  Coleridge  represents  perfectly 
that  side  of  the  romantic  imagination  which  seeks  to  lose 

itself  in  dream  and  marvel;  to  conjure  up  a 
tics^oTffis5'  wor^  °f  phantasmal  scenery  and  of  super- 
Poetry,  natural  happenings,  illuminated  by  "a  light 

that  never  was  on  sea  or  land."  "Kubla 
Khan"  paints  an  oriental  dream-picture,  as  splendid  and 
as  impalpable  as  the  palaces  and  plunging  rivers  and 
"caverns  measureless  to  man,"  which  we  sometimes  sec- 
lifted  for  a  moment  out  of  a  stormy  sunset.  "Christa- 
bel,"  which  seems  in  its  fragmentary  form  to  have  been 
planned  as  the  story  of  a  young  girl  fallen  under  the  spell 
of  an  unearthly  demon  in  woman's  shape,  moves  in  a 
mediaeval  atmosphere  blended  of  beauty  and  horror — a 
horror  poignantly  vague,  freezing  the  heart  with  its  sug- 
gestion of  all  that  is  malign  and  cruel  in  the  spirit  world. 
''The  Ancient  Mariner,"  Coleridge's  one  finished  master- 
piece, stands  almost  alone  in  literature  for  the  complete- 
ness with  which  it  creates  an  illusion  of  reality  while 
dealing  with  images  and  events  manifestly  unreal.  Its 
great  pictures  of  night  and  morning,  of  arctic  and  tropic 
seas;  its  melodies  of  whispering  keel  and  rustling  sails, 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  301 

and  of  dead  throats  singing  spectral  carols;  its  strange 
music,  richer  and  more  various  even  than  that  of  "Kubla 
Khan,"  though  not  so  grand  and  spacious— these  char- 
acteristics, to  say  nothing  of  the  fruitful  lesson  lying  at 
its  heart,  make  "The  Ancient  Mariner"  a  poem  with 
scarcely  an  equal  in  its  kind.  It  is  manifestly  a  dream, 
but  a  dream  caught  in  a  magic  mirror,  which  holds  it 
spellbound  in  immortal  freshness.  "The  Ancient  Mari- 
ner" was  Coleridge's  chief  contribution  to  Lyrical  Bal- 
lads; in  itself  it  represented  a  whole  domain  splendidly 
conquered  for  the  reawakened  imaginations  of  men. 

William  Wordsworth  was  born  in  1770,  at  Cockermouth 
in  Cumberland,  and  he  received  his  early  education  at 
the  country  grammar-school  at  Hawkshead, 
in  the  Lake  region.  After  leaving  the  Uni-  J£erdsworth's 
versity  of  Cambridge  in  1 791  he  spent  nearly 
two  years  in  France,  watching  with  enthusiastic  hope  the 
middle  stages  of  the  French  Revolution,  and  sharing  in 
the  ardent  social  enthusiasm  which  summed  itself  up  in 
the  motto  of  the  revolutionists,  "Liberty,  Equality,  Fra- 
ternity." He  was  in  Paris  late  in  1792,  before  the  awful 
excesses  of  the  Reign  of  Terror  began;  and  he  was  on  the 
point  of  throwing  in  his  lot  with  the  revolutionists  when 
a  stoppage  of  his  funds  compelled  him  to  return  to  Eng- 
land. The  failure  of  his  hopes  and  plans,  personal  and 
political,  induced  in  him  a  profound  despondency.  Dur- 
ing this  critical  period,  he  says,  his  sister  Dorothy's  in- 
fluence kept  alive  the  poet  in  him,  by  directing  his  mind 
toward  the  sources  of  permanent  strength  and  joy  which 
lie  in  nature  and  in  human  sympathy : 

She  gave  me  eyes,  she  gave  me  ears; 
And  humble  cares,  and  delicate  fears; 
A  heart,  the  fountain  of  sweet  tears, 
And  love,  and  thought,  and  joy. 

Their  residence  at  Alfoxden,  with  Coleridge,  1797-1798, 
marks  the  true  beginning  of  Wordsworth's  poetic  career; 


302  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

for  up  to  this  time,  though  he  had  written  much,  he  had 
not  found  his  genuine  matter  and  manner.  In  "We  are 
Seven,"  "Expostulation  and  Reply,"  "Lines  in  Early 
Spring,"  "Tintern  Abbey,"  and  other  pieces  written  at 
this  time,  the  true  Wordsworth  is  apparent.  During  the 
winter  in  Germany  which  followed,  he  added  to  these 
pieces  some  of  his  most  characteristic  poems,  such  as 
"She  Dwelt  Among  the  Untrodden  Ways"  and  "Three 
Years  She  Grew  in  Sun  and  Shower."  On  his  return 
he  settled  with  his  sister  in  a  cottage  at  Grasmere,  on 
Lake  Grasmere,  and  in  1802  he  married.  At  Grasmere, 
and  afterward  at  Rydal  Mount  near  the  head  of  Winder- 
mere,  he  lived  for  fifty  years  among  the  Cumberland  dales- 
men, leading  an  existence  as  pastoral  and  as  frugal  as 
theirs,  reading  little  and  meditating  much,  looking  with 
deep,  unwearied  delight  upon  the  mountains  and  skies 
and  waters  which  had  fascinated  him  in  boyhood.  A 
small  legacy  from  a  friend,  and  later  an  appointment  as 
distributor  of  stamps,  made  him  independent,  and  left 
virtually  his  whole  time  free  for  the  pursuit  of  poetry, 
which  was  for  him,  as  for  Milton,  not  only  an  art  but  a 
solemn  ministry.  The  heights  of  his  poetic  achievement 
are  marked  successively  by  such  pieces  as  "Michael" 
(1800);  "The  Leech-Gatherer,"  the  sonnets  to  Milton, 
to  Toussaint  L'Ouverture,  "It  Is  a  Beauteous  Evening" 
and  "Westminster  Bridge"  (1802);  "The  Solitary 
Reaper"  and  "Yarrow  Unvisited"  (1803);  the  "Ode  to 
Duty,"  "To  a  Skylark,"  and  The  Prelude  (1805);  "The 
World  Is  Too  Much  With  Us"  and  "The  Ode  on  the  In- 
timations of  Immortality"  (1806);  "Song  at  the  Feast 
of  Brougham  Castle"  (1807),  and  The  Excursion  (1814). 
After  this  last  date  Wordsworth's  genius  gradually  stiff- 
ened, and  he  produced  little  more  poetry  of  the  first 
order.  This  decline  in  poetic  power  in  his  later  years 
was  accorrpanied  by  a  reaction  from  the  social  and  politi- 
cal radicalism  of  his  youth  into  a  firm  conservatism, 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF  ROMANTICISM  303 

which  led  him  to  uphold  existing  institutions  of  church 
and  state  in  the  spirit  of  Burke.  .  For  many  years  his 
poetry  met  with  neglect  and  ridicule,  but  he  gradually 
drew  to  himself  the  attention  and  veneration  of  the  best 
minds.  The  crowd  turned  aside  to  follow  first  Scott, 
then  Byron,  and  then  Tennyson;  but  those  whose  suf- 
frages were  of  most  value  rallied  in  increasing  numbers 
about  the  "good  old  steel-gray  figure"  of  the  Cumber- 
land poet;  and  before  his  death  in  1850  he  enjoyed  a  late 
but  sure  renown. 

In  Wordsworth  the  growing  sensibility  to  natural  phe- 
nomena, which  we  have  traced  from  Thomson  and  Col- 
lins down  to  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, reached  its  height.  He  was  gifted  by  ffis  Nature- 
nature  with  an  eye  and  an  ear  marvellously  Sensitiveness, 
sensitive  to  those  slight  and  elusive  impres- 
sions which  most  persons  pass  by  without  noticing  at  all. 
This  sensibility  was  increased  by  a  long  life  spent  in  the 
country,  in  a  region  full  of  charm  and  even  of  grandeur; 
and  it  was  made  efficacious  by  a  remarkable  serenity  and 
patience,  which  enabled  him  to  gather  all  the  riches  of 
the  inanimate  world,  without  haste  and  without  disturb- 
ing excitement.  Hence  his  poetry  is  full  of  exquisitely 
noted  sights  and  sounds — the  shadow  of  the  daisy  on  the 
stone,  the  mist  which  follows  the  hare  as  she  runs  across 
a  rain-drenched  moor,  the  echo  of  the  cuckoo's  voice, 
the  varying  noise  of  waters,  and  the  many  voices  of  the 
wind.  "To  read  one  of  his  longer  pastoral  poems  for  the 
first  time,"  it  has  been  said,  "is  like  a  day  spent  in  a  new 
country."  And  all  these  sights  and  sounds  are  given 
with  absolute  truthfulness  to  the  fact.  There 

Its  Truth. 

is  no  effect  of  heightening  nature,  of  seeing 
her  clothed  in  a  light  brighter  or  stranger  than  her  own. 
Wordsworth  writes  "with  his  eye  on  the  object,"  content 
to  portray  what  he  sees.     He  learned  from  Burns  that 
" verse  can  build  a  princely  throne  on  humble  truth"; 


304  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

and  everywhere  he  gives  an  impression  of  unquestioning, 
reverent  faithfulness  to  the  fact  which  his  senses  have 
perceived.  It  follows  that  the  greater  part  of  his  nature- 
studies  are  in  a  low  key;  in  the  rareness  of  their  grandeurs 
and  glories,  they  breathe  the  modesty  of  nature.  Espe- 
cially noteworthy  is  the  predominance  in 

Its  Breadth.        ___     J,  .        .  ,J 

Wordsworth  of  broad  elementary  impressions 
— mere  darkness  and  light,  the  silence  of  the  sky,  the 
moon  "  looking  round  her  when  the  heavens  are  bare," 
the  twilight  with  its  one  star,  the  breathlessness  of  the 
evening  sea,  the  lonesomeness  of  upland  fields,  the  "sleep 
that  is  among  the  lonely  hills."  It  is  the  keenness  of 
Wordsworth's  sensibility  to  nature,  and  his  quiet,  re- 
ligious acceptance  of  her  as  she  is,  and  his  unwearied 
delight  in  her  broadest  and  simplest  phases,  which  to- 
gether make  him  the  first  of  her  poets. 

This  same  sobriety  and  truth  of  tone,  this  same  rever- 
ent regard  for  the  great  commonplaces  of  life,  characterize 

also  Wordsworth's  treatment  of  human  na- 

^H^Sm11*11*  ture-     He  deals  with  the  broad  elementary 
Nature.  passions,  the  every-day    affections,    occupa- 

tions, and  duties,  in  a  state  of  society  where 
man  is  simplest  and  nearest  to  the  soil.  In  many  of  his 
best  poems,  indeed,  the  human  beings  whom  he  pictures 
seem  almost  a  part  of  the  landscape,  an  emanation  from 
nature  herself,  like  the  trees  or  the  rocks.  The  figure  of 
the  leech-gatherer  on  the  moor  seems  as  much  a  part  of 
the  natural  landscape  as  the  pool  by  which  he  stands ;  the 
woman  who  speaks  to  the  poet  in  "Stepping  Westward" 
seems  a  part  of  the  sunset,  so  blended  is  she  with  the 
scene;  in  "The  Highland  Reaper"  the  singing  of  the  girl 
comes  out  of  the  heart  of  the  day,  like  the  spirit  of  an- 
cestral Scotland  telling  over  its  "old  unhappy  far-off 
things,  and  battles  long  ago";  she  is  hardly  more  of  a 
human  personality  than  the  cuckoo  or  the  nightingale 
to  which  the  poet  compares  her  voice.  Even  when  he 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF  ROMANTICISM  305 

looks  closer  at  his  human  characters,  and  shows  us  their 
passions  and  the  accidents  of  their  life,  they  still  partake 
of  the  simplicity  and  breadth  of  external  nature,  remind- 
ing us  of  the  characters  of  Bible  story  or  of  the  simple, 
tragic  figures  of  the  French  peasant  painter  Millet. 
The  story  of  Margaret,  in  the  first  book  of  The  Excursion, 
illustrates  this,  as  does  in  a  still  better  way  "Michael," 
the  greatest  example  of  Wordsworth's  power  to  give  to 
the  simple  tragedies  of  the  peasant  world  a  monumental 
impressiveness.  He  is  the  poet  of  human  life  in  its  low- 
est terms,  of  that  joy  and  sorrow  which  is  "in  widest 
commonalty  spread."  He  looks  to  find  the  true  signifi- 
cance of  life  on  its  lower  levels,  as  did  Crabbe;  but  with 
far  more  sympathy,  depth,  and  spiritual  glow  than 
Crabbe  was  able  to  bring  to  bear  upon  his  subject.  The 
best  praise  he  can  give  his  own  wife  is  that  she  is  a  "being 
breathing  thoughtful  breath,"  in  whose  countenance  meet 
sweet  household  records  and  promises.  For  Milton  his 
best  praise  is  that,  although  his  "soul  was  like  a  star  and 
dwelt  apart,"  yet  it  laid  upon  itself  "the  lowliest  duties" 
along  "life's  common  way."  With  Wordsworth  the  doc- 
trine of  simplicity  was  a  thoroughgoing  one,  and  entered 
into  his  entire  conception  not  only  of  art  but  of  life. 

Yet  we  should  have  but  a  very  partial  understanding  of 
Wordsworth's  personality  and  of  his  poetic  meaning  if  we 
stopped  here.     There  was  in  him,  besides  the 
realist  and  the  moralist,  the  mystic.     Nature          *    ys 


is  for  him,  even  when  he  portrays  her  external 
aspect  with  the  most  naked  truth,  never  merely  a  physi- 
cal fact;  nor  has  man,  even  when  most  blended  in  with 
her  external  features,  merely  a  physical  relation  to  her. 
On  the  contrary,  nature  is  everywhere  mystically  trans- 
fused with  spirit,  and  speaks  mystically  to  the  spirit  in 
man,  working  upon  him  by  the  power  of  kinship  and 
mutual  understanding.  Perhaps  the  most  complete  ex- 
pression of  this  aspect  of  his  thought  is  "Tintern  Abbey," 


306  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

which  appeared  in  the  Lyrical  Ballads.  "Tintern  Ab- 
bey" was  written  during  a  walking  tour  which  Words- 
worth took  in  1798,  in  company  with  his  sister,  through 
a  country  familiar  to  him  in  earlier  years. 
Tne  well-remembered  scenery  of  the  River 
Wye  calls  up  before  his  musing  thought  the 
picture  of  his  boyhood,  with  its  passionate  absorption  in 
nature,  when  "the  sounding  cataract  haunted  him  like 
a  passion,"  and  the  rocks,  the  mountains,  and  the  woods 
were  to  him  "an  appetite."  He  shows  how  the  influences 
of  nature,  acting  upon  the  plastic  soul  of  youth,  bear  fruit 
in  later  life,  in  "sensations  sweet  felt  in  the  blood  and 
felt  along  the  heart,"  and  "little  nameless  unremembered 
acts  of  kindness  and  of  love ' ' ;  and  how  they  lift  the  spirit 
which  remembers  them,  to 

that  blessed  mood 

In  which  the  burden  of  the  mystery, 
In  which  the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world 
Is  lightened  .  .  . 

While  with  an  eye  made  quiet  by  the  power 
Of  harmony,  and  the  deep  power  of  joy, 
We  see  into  the  life  of  things. 

And  he  suggests  a  metaphysical  explanation  for  this 
strange  power  which  nature  has  to  soothe  and  ennoble 
the  human  soul,  namely,  that  throughout  nature  there 
is  diffused  the  active  spirit  of  God,  living  and  working 
in  her: 

I  have  felt 

A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts;  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean,  and  the  living  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man; 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thoughts, 
And  rolls  through  all  things. 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  307 

"Tintern  Abbey"  gives  us  almost  a  complete  "pro- 
gramme" of  Wordsworth's  poetic  career.  In  it  we  see 
marked  out  clearly  the  main  paths  which  his  mind  fol- 
lowed during  a  long  lifetime  of  lonely  contemplation.  In 
many  noble  poems  he  developed  the  three  themes  here 
given  out:  the  eternal  beauty  of  nature,  which  waits 
everywhere  about  us  "to  haunt,  to  startle,  and  waylay"; 
the  power  of  that  beauty  to  heal,  gladden,  and  fortify 
whoever  gives  it  welcome;  and  the  mystic  source  of  this 
power,  the  spirit  of  God,  hidden  yet  apparent  in  all  the 
visible  creation,  building  for  itself  a  "metropolitan  tem- 
ple in  the  hearts"  of  simple  and  unselfish  men.  Perhaps 
the  most  exquisite  expression  he  has  given  to  the  idea  of 
nature's  formative  power  upon  the  soul,  and  through  the 
soul  upon  the  body  of  man,  is  the  poem  beginning  "  Three 
Years  She  Grew  in  Sun  and  Shower." 

The  instinct  to  perceive  nature  and  human  life  in  tran- 
scendental terms  was  very  early  manifested  in  Words- 
worth.   In  his  school-days  at  Hawkshead  the 
world   would    sometimes,   he   tells   us,   seem    ^jsj;  *Jeta~ 
suddenly  to  dissolve,  and  he  would  fall  into  imagination." 
an  abyss  of  idealism  from  which  he  had  to 
bring  himself  back  to  reality  by  grasping  at  the  wall  by 
the  roadside,  or  by  stooping  to  pick  up  a  stone.     This 
habit  of  mind,  sobered  and  strengthened  by  reflection, 
pervades  all  his  poetry,  and  gives  to  it  a  peculiarly  stimu- 
lating character.     In  reading  him,  we  never  know  when 
the  actual  landscape  and  the  simple  human  story  will 
widen  out  suddenly  into  some  vaster  theme,  looking  be- 
yond space  and  time;  so  that  he  awakens  in  us  a  kind  of 
spiritual  apprehension  or  expectancy  which  forces  us  to 
look  below  the  surface  of  his  simplest  poem, 
and  to  be  on  the  alert  for  a  meaning  deeper    "intimations 

or  1  minor- 

than   its    primary   one.     The    "Ode   on   the    taiity." 

Intimations  of  Immortality"  is  the  poem  in 

which  the  speculation  is  boldest.    In  this  ode,  which  Em- 


308  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

erson  called  "  the  high-water  mark  of  poetry  in  the  nine- 
teenth century,"  the  poet  looks  back  with  passionate  re- 
gret to  the  lost  radiance  of  his  childhood,  and  tries  to  con- 
nect childhood  reassuringly  not  only  with  manhood  and 
old  age,  but  also  with  a  previous  existence,  whence  it 
brings  its  light  of  innocence  and  joy.  The  poem  is  a 
product  of  that  majestic  kind  of  metaphysical  imagina- 
tion which  transcends  space  and  time,  and  makes 

Our  noisy  years  seem  moments  in  the  being 
Of  the  eternal  silence. 

In  the  "Intimations"  and  other  poems  mystically  con- 
ceived, Wordsworth  took  the  inheritance  of  the  seven- 
teenth-century mystics,  and  of  Blake,  and  gave  it  a  clearer 
development,  just  as  in  his  naturalistic  poetry  he  carried 
to  large  issues  the  work  of  Cowper,  Crabbe,  and  Burns. 
Wordsworth's  position  and  influence  are  due  partly  to 
the  fact  that  he  greatly  enlarged  the  boundaries  of 

poetry,  giving  it,  as  subject-matter,  themes 
style.8*"  8  varying  from  the  joys  and  sorrows  of  simple, 

homely  lives,  to  the  transcendental  interests 
of  the  soul  in  communion  with  nature  and  God;  partly 
to  his  development  of  a  poetic  style  befitting  such  mate- 
rial. His  first  youthful  verse  was  written  after  the 
manner  of  Pope,  in  heroic  couplet  and  in  the  artificial 
language  current  in  the  eighteenth  century.  But  in 
Lyrical  Ballads  he  made  a  conscious  change,  which  he 
explained  in  the  preface  to  the  second  edition  in  1800. 
The  effort  in  Wordsworth's  contributions  to  the  volume 
was  to  treat  incidents  from  common  life,  and  to  relate 
them  in  language  really  used  by  men.  He  took  as  much 
pains  to  avoid  poetic  diction  as  was  ordinarily  taken  to 
employ  it,  and  relied  for  imaginative  coloring  on  the 
passion  which  men  would  express  in  the  situations  which 
he  selected,  and  which  would  give  to  their  language  dig- 
nity, variety,  and  metaphor.  Clearly,  much  depended 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  309 

on  the  poet's  choice  of  the  situation  to  be  treated,  and 
Wordsworth  was  not  uniformly  happy  in  his  selection. 
Common  frequently  remained  commonplace,  and  his 
language,  in  consequence,  did  not  rise  above  sheer  prose. 
Again,  his  lack  of  humor  sometimes  led  him,  as  in  "The 
Idiot  Boy,"  into  manifest  absurdity.  In  portraying  his 
own  life  and  thought  he  fell  into  the  same  confusion, 
owing  to  his  inability  to  distinguish  between  the  supreme 
and  the  commonplace,  and  accordingly  he  wrote  in  two 
styles,  one  inspired,  the  other  pedestrian.  His  mind 
was,  in  ordinary  moods,  matter-of-fact,  and  it  worked 
slowly  and  stiffly.  But  just  in  proportion  to  the  amount 
of  spiritual  energy  required  to  fuse  this  reluctant  metal 
of  his  mind  into  a  plastic  and  glowing  state,  is  the  beauty 
and  permanency  of  the  product  of  his  highest  creative 
moments;  so  that  his  finest  poems  seem  as  little  subject 
to  the  touch  of  time,  as  immune  from  decay,  as  the 
mountains  or  the  stars. 

It  has  long  been  traditional  to  associate  with  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge,  in  the  triad  of  ''Lake  Poets,"  the 
name  of  Robert  Southey  (1774-1843),  Coleridge's 
brother-in-law  and  colleague  in  the  scheme  of  Southey. 
pantisocracy.  Southey  felt  the  impulse  of  escape 
from  the  present  world  into  the  regions  of  the  past  and 
the  distant,  especially  the  Orient,  but  with  him  this  im- 
pulse was  nourished  rather  by  reading  and  study  than 
by  inward  experience.  He  settled  in  the  Lake  country 
in  1803,  and  there  gave  himself  largely  to  study  and  in- 
dustrious writing  of  prose  as  well  as  poetry,  for  he  had 
Coleridge's  family  to  support  in  part,  as  well  as  his 
own.  His  romanticism  found  expression  in  long  poems, 
Thalaba  the  Destroyer  (1801),  based  on  Mohammedan 
legend,  and  The  Curse  of  Kehama  (1810),  on  Hindu 
mythology.  He  is  best  remembered  for  his  ballads  in 
modern  form,  "The  Inchcape  Rock,"  "The  Crocodile 
King,"  and  "Bishop  Hatto,"  and  for  his  admirable  biog- 


310  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

raphies  of  Nelson,  John  Wesley,  and  John  Bunyan.  He, 
like  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  shared  in  the  political 
idealism  of  the  early  days  of  the  French  Revolution,  and 
like  them  came  to  distrust  popular  government  and  be- 
came a  strenuous  defender  of  the  institutions  of  the 
past.  Although  one  of  the  Lake  Poets,  he  holds  his 
place  less  by  poetic  quality  than  by  personal  association. 
We  have  seen  how  the  revolt  against  eighteenth-cen- 
tury actuality  and  ''common  sense"  found  expression  in 
the  wild  phantasmagories  of  Blake,  and  in  the 
strange  dream-world  of  Coleridge.  We  have 


Revolt  seen  likewise  how  the  reaction  from  the  rigid 

Summarized.  .  .      .  .    ,  . 

social  aristocracy  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  from  its  contempt  for  the  lowly  aspects  of  human 
existence,  led,  through  the  harsh  realism  of  Crabbe,  to 
Burns's  passionate  vindication  of  the  primary  instincts, 
and  to  Wordsworth's  solemn  revealment  of  the  majesty 
of  simple  lives.  We  have  seen,  too,  how  the  protest 
against  eighteenth-century  "urbanity"  and  absorption 
in  the  life  of  the  town  led,  through  Cowper's  mild  delight 
in  rural  things,  to  the  piercing  tenderness  of  Burns's 
"Mountain  Daisy,"  and  to  the  mystical  insight  of  Words- 
worth's "Tintern  Abbey."  In  like  manner,  the  revul- 
sion from  the  Augustan  indifference  to  the  Middle  Ages 
led,  through  the  forgeries  of  Chatterton  and  the  epic 
chants  of  the  pseudo-Ossian,  to  Scott,  for  whom  it  was 
reserved  to  create  the  life  of  the  past  on  a  vast  scale,  and 
with  an  unparalleled  illusion  of  truth. 

Walter  Scott  was  born  in  Edinburgh  in  1771;  his  father 
was  a  lawyer,  but  was  descended  from  a  vigorous  and 

warlike  border  clan.     Scott  developed  early 

a  Passi°n  ^or  tne  ballad  minstrelsy  of  his 
Poet.  land;  and  he  spent  many  days  of  his  youth 

roaming  over  the  country,  gathering  ballads 
and  scraps  of  ballads  from  the  lips  of  peasants.  His  col- 
lection was  published  as  Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  31 J 

in  1802.  Except  for  a  few  ballads  in  the  "grewsome"  vein 
made  popular  by  the  "Lenore"  of  Burger,  the  pioneer  of 
German  romanticism,  Scott  wrote  no  original  poetry 
until  his  thirty- fourth  year.  In  1805  appeared  The  Lay 
cf  the  Last  Minstrel,  in  which  a  thread  of  gothic  super- 
naturalism  is  woven  into  a  tale  of  Scotch  border  life  in 
the  Middle  Ages.  This  was  followed  in  1808  by  Mar- 
mion.  Marmion  exhibited  in  much  greater  measure  the 
brilliant  descriptive  color,  the  swift  and  powerful  narra- 
tive movement,  and  the  ringing,  energetic  music,  which 
had  made  the  Lay  instantly  popular;  and  it  showed  a 
great  advance  over  the  earlier  poem  in  lifelikeness  and 
breadth.  Scarcely  more  than  a  year  later  appeared  The 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  a  story  softer  and  more  idyllic  than 
Marmion,  yet  not  lacking  in  wild  and  stirring  episodes; 
in  it  Scott  came  far  nearer  than  he  had  done  in  his  earlier 
poems  to  the  broad,  imaginative  handling  of  mediaeval 
Scotch  life  which  he  afterward  gave  in  his  prose  ro- 
mances. 

These  three  poems,  presenting  many  of  the  new  ro- 
mantic motives  in  popularly  attractive  form,  took  the 
reading  world  by  storm.  The  diction  em- 
ployed in  them  was  not,  Like  the  language  of 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  so  startlingly 
novel  as  a  literary  medium  that  it  repelled  the  unaccus- 
tomed ear.  The  metre  was  strong  and  buoyant,  appeal- 
ing powerfully  to  a  public  weary  of  the  monotonous 
couplets  of  the  preceding  age,  but  unable  to  appreciate 
the  delicate  melodies  of  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Expe- 
rience and  the  Lyrical  Ballads.  The  romantic  scenery, 
brightly  and  firmly  painted,  but  always  kept  subordinate 
to  the  action;  the  character  delineation,  picturesque  but 
not  subtle;  and  the  vigorous  sweep  of  the  story — all  ap- 
pealed to  the  popular  heart.  Scott  himself  described  the 
peculiar  excellence  of  his  poetry  truly  enough,  though 
with  characteristic  modesty,  as  consisting  in  a  "hurried 


312        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

frankness  of  composition  which  pleases  soldiers,  sailors, 
and  young  people  of  bold  and  active  disposition." 

Scott's  metrical  tales  did  much  to  popularize  romanti- 
cism in  its  broader  phases.  He  was,  however,  not  much 
in  earnest  as  a  poet;  and  when  the  public  turned  to  the 
more  lurid  and  extravagant  verse-tales  of  Byron,  Scott 
cheerfully  resigned  his  place  to  the  younger  man,  and 
began  his  far  greater  work  in  prose  (see  page  395). 

The  popular  triumph  of  romanticism  was  also  aided  by 
another  Scotch  poet,  Thomas  Campbell  (1777-1844). 
He  began  his  career  as  a  follower  of  the 
Cam'JJbeii.  Augustans,  and  was  known  during  his  uni- 
versity career  as  the  "Pope  of  Glasgow."  In 
Germany,  where  he  went  in  1799,  he  fell  under  the  influ- 
ence of  Burger  and  the  other  early  German  romanticists, 
and  in  1803  he  published  a  volume  of  poems  in  the  new 
manner,  among  which  "Lochiel,"  "Hohenlinden,"  and 
"The  Exile  of  Erin"  attained  and  have  held  a  great 
popular  esteem.  Afterward  he  published  his  famous 
war-odes,  "The  Battle  of  the  Baltic"  and  "Ye  Mariners 
of  England."  These  splendid  battle-chants,  full  of  mar- 
tial energy  and  kindling  enthusiasm,  rank  with  the  best 
war-poetry  of  England,  and  are  worthy  of  the  race  which 
holds  the  dominion  of  the  sea. 

The  group  of  poets  who  came  to  manhood  when  the 
French  Revolution  was  at  its  height  reacted  during  the 
Conservatism  NaPoleonic  wars  into  settled  conservatism, 
of  Scott  and  Scott,  indeed,  by  the  accident  of  his  early 
p0Seteake  surroundings,  was  conservative  from  the 
first.  Southey  and  Coleridge,  after  their 
youthful  enthusiasm  for  a  new  Utopian  scheme  of  society, 
took  refuge,  the  one  in  political  Toryism,  the  other  in 
the  mystical  pedantries  of  German  philosophy.  Words- 
worth, who  had  felt  the  storm  and  stress  of  revolutionary 
ideas  more  than  any  of  the  others,  after  a  long  period  of 
wavering  and  disappointment,  finally  intrenched  himself 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  313 

behind  the  institutions  of  church  and  state  as  he  found 
them.     The   two   poets   whom   we   now   ap- 
proach, Byron  and  Shelley,  took  up  the  torch   Radicalism  of 
of    revolution    which    had    been   kindled    in   Shelley. 
France  during  their  childhood,  and  carried  it 
flaming  into  new  regions  of  thought  and  feeling. 

George  Gordon,  Lord  Byron,  was  born  in  1788,  of  a 
family  of  noblemen  notorious  for  their  passionate  tem- 
per, their  adventures,  and  their  unsocial  con- 
duct. He  was  of  extraordinary  physical  2d°Writings 
beauty,  and  a  lameness  of  one  foot  added  to 
this  a  touch  of  pathos.  Personal  fascination  was  his  from 
the  first.  He  mastered  his  little  world  of  school-fellows 
at  Harrow  with  the  same  enthralling  power  of  personality 
which  later  took  captive  the  imagination  of  Europe.  His 
first  volume  of  poems,  Hours  of  Idleness  (1807),  an  im- 
mature little  book,  was  mercilessly  ridiculed  in  the  Edin- 
burgh Review.  Byron  nursed  his  revenge,  and  in  1809 
he  published  a  vigorous  onslaught  upon  his  critics,  en- 
titled English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers.  This  poem  is 
written  in  the  manner  of  Pope,  for  whom  Byron  always 
professed  admiration,  and  is  not  unworthy  of  his  school, 
either  in  mastery  of  the  heroic  couplet  or  in  energy  of 
satire.  It  is  significant  that  Byron's  first  signal  perform- 
ance should  have  been  conceived  in  a  satiric  vein,  and 
educed  by  a  blow  to  his  personal  pride. 

Two  years  later  the  young  poet  set  off  upon  his  travels, 
which  he  sketched  in  the  first  two  cantos  of  Childe  Harold 
(1812).  Not  content  with  the  conventional  "  grand 
tour,"  he  pushed  on  into  Albania,  Greece,  and  the  islands 
of  the  ^Egean;  dining  in  the  tents  of  robber  chieftains, 
rescuing  distressed  beauties  from  death  at  the  hand  of 
harem  slaves,  and  doing  many  other  romantic  things. 
The  public,  at  any  rate,  was  eager  to  ascribe  all  these 
adventures  to  him,  incited  thereto  by  the  lurid  verse- 
romances,  The  Giaour  (1813),  The  Corsair  (1814),  Lara 


314  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

(1814),  and  others,  which  he  now  poured  out  with  prodi- 
gal swiftness.  These  eastern  tales  were  crude  and  melo- 
dramatic, but  they  appealed  enormously  to  the  popular 
taste,  and  quite  eclipsed  Scott's  saner  and  healthier  muse. 

Byron's  return  to  England  and  his  marriage  were 
quickly  followed  by  a  separation  from  his  wife  and  by 
his  final  departure  from  his  native  country.  The  next 
years  he  spent  in  Switzerland  and  Italy,  part  of  the  time 
in  company  with  Shelley.  To  this  period  belong  his  most 
important  works,  the  later  cantos  of  Childe  Harold  (1816- 
1818),  the  dramas  Manfred  (1817)  and  Cain  (1821),  and 
his  satiric  masterpiece,  Don  Juan  (1819-1824).  The  ro- 
mance of  his  life  was  crowned  by  a  romantic  and  generous 
death.  In  1824  he  went  to  Greece,  to  put  himself  at  the 
head  of  the  revolutionary  forces  gathered  to  liberate  that 
country  from  the  tyranny  of  the  Sultan.  He  was  seized 
with  fever  in  the  swamps  of  Missolonghi,  and  died  before 
he  had  had  time  to  prove  his  ability  as  a  leader. 

In  his  eastern  tales  and  his  dramas  Byron  presents 
under  many  names  one  hero — himself,  or  rather  an  ex- 
aggerated shadow  of  one  side  of  himself.  The 

The  Easte  Conrads  and  Laras  Qf  ^  ^^  are  aU  proud 

and  lonely  souls  in  revolt;  mysteriously 
wicked,  infernally  proud,  quixotically  generous,  and  above 
all  melancholy.  They  all  represent  the  individual  in 
revolt  against  society.  In  Manfred  and  Cain  these  crude 
outlines  became  imposing  silhouettes,  thrown  out  sharply 
against  a  background  half-real  and  half-supernatural. 
The  scene  of  Manfred  is  laid  in  the  high  Alps,  where  the 
hero  lives  in  his  castle  in  gloomy  and  bitter  isolation, 
communing  with  unearthly  powers,  and  scornfully  work- 

The  Dramas-  ing  out  his  dark  fate>  Cain,  though  imper- 
Reasons  fectly  carried  out,  is  superbly  conceived. 
pJpSSy.  The  earthly  rebel  and  first  shedder  of  human 
blood,  under  the  guidance  of  Lucifer,  the 
rebel  angel,  visits  hell  and  chaos,  and  there  finds  grounds 


THE    TRIUMPH    OF   ROMANTICISM  315 

for  the  godless  hatred  that  is  in  him.  It  was  by  these 
plays,  from  one  point  of  view  truly  terrible,  that  Byron 
earned  his  title  as  founder  and  chief  exemplar  of  the 
"Satanic  school"  of  poetry.  They  are  perhaps  the  most 
uncompromising  expression  of  individualism,  and  the 
most  thoroughgoing  negation  of  the  social  ideal  to  be 
found  in.  our  literature.  Their  popularity,  which  was 
instant  and  enormous  throughout  Europe,  was  largely 
due  to  historical  causes.  The  French  Revolution,  the 
most  daring  reach  which  the  human  race  has  ever  made 
after  an  ideal  social  state,  had  failed.  Europe,  under  the 
rule  of  the  monarchs  who  had  overthrown  Napoleon,  had 
swung  back  from  its  eager  dreams  of  freedom  and  fra- 
ternity into  a  gloomy  mood,  in  which  the  still  potent 
spirit  of  rebellion  became  personal,  self-centred,  and  anti- 
social. Byron  represented  and  justified  to  the  European 
mind  this  recoil,  and  Byronism  became  a  passion,  a 
disease. 

Childe  Harold  presents   the  Byronic  hero  in  a  more 
elegiac  mood,  as  a  pensive  wanderer  through  Europe  and 
the  East.     It  is   not  until   the  later  cantos 
that  the  verse  rises  into  real  magnificence.       Descriptive 
Among  the  lakes  and  mountain  solitudes  of       Poet: 
Switzerland,  the  decaying  glories  of  Venice,       Harold." 
and  the  imperial  ruins  of  Rome,  the  poet's 
imagination  is  genuinely  kindled,  and  the  passages  which 
celebrate  these  scenes  are  among  the  triumphs  of  descrip- 
tive poetry  in  our  language.     Byron  paints  his  pictures 
in  free,  bold  strokes,  and  with  a  pomp  of  rhetoric  well 
suited  to  his  grandiose  subjects.     He  makes  up  in  broad 
impressiveness  what  he  lacks  in  subtlety.     His  music, 
too,  is  loud  and  sonorous;  without  the  heartfelt,  searching 
beauty  of  greater  melodists,  but  with  an  orchestral  sweep 
and  volume  appropriate  to  the  theme. 

In   Don  Juan   Byron   wrote   his  masterpiece,   and  it 
proved   to  be   neither   dramatic   nor   lyric,   but   satiric. 


316        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Don  Juan  is  a  comprehensive  satire  upon  modern  soci- 
ety. The  hero  is  a  Castilian  youth,  a  light-hearted, 
irresponsible  pagan  creature,  who  wanders 
Byron  as  a  through  Turkey,  Russia,  and  England,  meet- 
"D^Tjuan."  ing  all  sorts  of  adventures,  particularly  such 
,as  are  calculated  to  shock  the  moral  sense, 
and  to  exhibit  the  social  corruption  hidden  under  the 
conventional  veneer.  The  poem  is,  in  effect,  a  long  peal 
of  scornful  laughter  flung  at  British  cant,  at  that  famous 
British  cant  which  Byron  declared  was  in  his  day  the 
"primum  mobile"  of  his  countrymen's  life,  both  national 
and  private.  In  his  more  serious  work  Byron  is  fatally 
subject  to  anticlimax.  His  imagination  and  his  power 
of  phrase  are  apt  to  fail  him  just  when  they  are  needed 
most.  In  Don  Juan  he  turns  this  defect  into  a  piquant 
virtue,  by  deliberately  cultivating  anticlimax  for  satiric 
ends.  He  drops  with  startling  suddenness  from  the  seri- 
ous to  the  trivial,  from  impassioned  poetry  to  mocking 
prose.  The  device  is  a  simple  one,  but  Byron  uses  it 
with  a  variety  and  zest  truly  wonderful,  and  secures  by 
means  of  it  an  effect  of  cynical  nonchalance  which  is  a 
triumph  of  its  kind. 

Byron's  was  a  personality  of  immense  force.  To  his 
age  he  was  a  pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and  of  fire  by  night, 
but  one  which  led  only  into  deeper  deserts  of 
influence  unfaith  and  negation.  Such  work  as  he  had 
and  style.  to  do  was  a  work  of  destruction;  the  age  cried 
out  for  it,  and  he  did  it  thoroughly.  Of  the 
higher  powers  of  poetry  he  possessed  few,  and  for  them 
he  cared  little.  He  was  a  careless  and  hasty  worker. 
In  his  own  words,  if  he  missed  his  first  spring  he  went 
growling  back  to  his  jungle.  That  he  was  a  great  writer, 
one  of  the  greatest,  is  as  certain  as  that  neither  by  the 
soul  nor  the  body  of  his  art  can  he  take  rank  with  the 
small  company  of  supreme  poets. 

Among  that  company,  a  presence  so  bright  and  strange 


THE    TRIUMPH    OF   ROMANTICISM 


317 


as  to  seem  in  truth  one  of  those  "spirits  from  beyond  the 
moon"  of  which  he  sang,  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  holds  a 
place.  He  was  born  in  1792,  just  when  the 
eyes  of  all  Europe  were  fixed  in  hope  and  Shelley's  Life 
fear  upon  France,  and  the  stars  fought  in  Determent, 
their  courses  for  the  triumph  of  a  new  order. 
At  Eton,  among  the  tyrannies  and  conventipns  of  a  great 
public  school,  his  sensitive  nature  was  thrown  into  a 
fever  of  rebellion  from  which  he  never  quite  worked  out 
into  spiritual  sanity  and  health.  "Mad  Shelley"  his 
schoolmates  called  him,  and  in  the  judgment  of  the  world 
he  remained  "Mad  Shelley"  to  the  end  of  his  life.  At 
Oxford,  whither  he  proceeded  in  1810,  he  read  the  scepti- 
cal French  philosophers,  and  deemed  it  his  duty  to  pub- 
lish his  religious  views  in  a  pamphlet  entitled  "The 
Necessity  of  Atheism,"  for  which  he  was  expelled.  An 
ill-starred  marriage  with  Harriet  Westbrook  followed, 
and  after  that  came  a  quixotic  attempt  to  arouse  Ireland 
to  seek  redress  for  her  national  wrongs.  The  young 
couple  carried  on  their  mission  by  throwing  from  the 
windows  of  their  lodging  in  Dublin  copies  of  Shelley's 
Address  to  the  Irish  People,  "to  every  passer-by  who 
seemed  likely."  They  continued  the  campaign  later  in 
Wales,  by  setting  tracts  adrift  in  the  sea  in  sealed  bottles, 
or  sending  them  down  the  wind  in  little  fire-balloons. 
The  curious  mixture  in  Shelley  of  the  real  and  the  unreal 
is  sharply  brought  out  by  the  fact  that  the  writings  thus 
fantastically  put  in  circulation  are  often  of  grave  and 
simple  eloquence,  wise  in  counsel  and  temperate  in  tone, 
and  that  most  of  the  reforms  which  they  advocate  have 
since  been  enacted  into  law. 

An  acquaintance  with  William  Godwin,  the  revolution- 
ary philosopher  and  novelist,  author  of  Political  Justice 
and  Caleb  Williams,  led  Shelley  to  write  Queen  Mab,  a 
crude  poem  attacking  dogmatic  religion,  government,  in- 
dustrial tyranny,  and  war.  He  separated  from  Harriet 


318  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Westbrook  In  1814,  and  united  himself  with  Godwin's 
daughter,  Mary,  who  after  Harriet's  suicide  became  his 
wife.  His  next  poem,  Alastor,  or  the  Spirit  of  Solitude 
(1816),  shows  his  aerial  genius  abandoning  the  earth  in  a 
spiritual  intoxication  of  dream  and  fancy.  This  was  fol- 
lowed in  1818  by  Laon  and  Cythna,  which  was  at  once 
suppressed  and  published  later  as  The  Revolt  of  Islam,  a 
long  narrative  in  Spenserian  stanza  of  passion  and  of 
social  revolution.  In  1818  the  Shelleys  went  to  Italy, 
where  his  powers  developed  rapidly.  At  Rome,  amid  the 
tangle  of  flowers  and  vines  which  at  that  time  covered  the 
mountainous  ruins  of  the  Baths  of  Caracalla,  he  wrote 
his  lyrical  drama,  Prometheus  Unbound.  The  same  year 
(1819)  he  finished  The  Cenci,  a  drama  intended  for  th<? 
stage,  and  written  in  much  more  simple  and  every-day 
language  than  his  other  works.  The  short  remainder  of 
his  life  is  marked  by  many  great  poems,  some  of  con- 
siderable length,  like  the  "Sensitive  Plant"  and  "Ado- 
nais";  others  shorter,  among  them  the  wonderful  "Ode 
to  the  West  Wind,"  and  the  best  known  of  all  Shelley's 
lyrics,  the  "Skylark."  In  1822  the  poet  was  drowned, 
while  sailing  off  Leghorn,  in  one  of  those  swift  storms 
which  sweep  the  Mediterranean  during  the  summer  heats. 
His  body  was  burned  on  the  beach,  and  his  ashes  were 
placed  in  the  Protestant  cemetery  at  Rome,  near  the 
grave  where,  a  few  months  before,  Keats  had  been  laid. 
Shelley's  most  characteristic  work,  both  in  thought 
and  style,  is  Prometheus  Unbound.  The  subject  was  sug- 
gested by  a  lost  drama  of  y^schylus,  in  which 
Characteristic  Prometheus,  the  heroic  friend  and  lover  of 
Work,  mankind,  was  unchained  from  a  bleak  preci- 

uXo™nd?'eUS  Pice  where  the  tyrant  Zeus  had  hung  him. 
In  Shelley's  treatment  Prometheus  represents, 
not  a  superhuman  helper  of  mankind,  but  Mankind  itself, 
heroic,  just,  gentle,  sacredly  thirsting  after  liberty  and 
spiritual  gladness,  but  chained  and  tortured  by  the  ruler 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  319 

of  Heaven.  In  the  fulness  of  time  Demogorgon  (Neces- 
sity) hurls  the  tyrant  from  his  throne;  and  Prometheus, 
amid  the  songs  of  Earth  and  the  Moon,  is  united  to  Asiat 
the  spirit  of  love  in  nature.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  Shelley 
shows  himself  a  child  of  the  French  Revolution,  in  be- 
lieving that  it  is  only  some  external  tyranny — the  might 
of  priests  and  kings,  the  weight  of  "custom,"  the  dark 
creed  of  superstition — which  keeps  mankind  from  rising 
to  his  ideal  stature.  But  if  the  philosophy  of  Prometheus 
is  immature  and  tinged  with  the  popular  misconceptions 
of  the  time,  the  nobility  of  its  mood,  the  heroic  enthusi- 
asm which  it  voices,  make  it  eternally  inspiring.  And 
for  its  spirit  of  sacred  passion  the  verse  of  the  poem  is  a 
glorious  vesture.  The  unearthly  beauty  of  its  imagery, 
the  keen  ethereal  music  of  its  songs  and  choruses,  make 
this  not  only  Shelley's  highest  achievement,  but  a  fixed 
star  in  the  firmament  of  poetry. 

It  is  in  its  lyrics  that  Prometheus  reaches  its  greatest 
altitudes,  for  Shelley's  genius  was  essentially  lyrical.  In 
all  his  best  songs  and  odes  the  words  seem  to 
be  moved  into  their  places  in  response  to 
some  hidden  tune,  wayward  and  strange  in 
its  movement,  but  always  rounding  into  a  perfect  whole. 
Such  a  poem  as  that  beginning  "  Swiftly  walk  over  the 
western  wave"  marks  perhaps  the  extreme  limit  of  the 
romantic  divergence  from  eighteenth-century  strictness 
of  form;  but  it  obeys  a  higher  law  than  that  of  regularity, 
and  with  all  its  waywardness  it  is  as  perfect  in  shape  as 
a  flower.  The  rhythmical  structure  of  the  "  West  Wind  " 
should  be  studied  as  a  typical  example  of  Shelley's  power 
to  make  the  movement  of  verse  embody  its  mood.  In 
this  ode,  the  impetuous  sweep  and  tireless  overflow  -of 
the  terza  rima,1  ending  after  each  twelfth  line  in  a  coup- 
let, suggest  with  wonderful  truth  the  streaming  and 
volleying  of  the  wind,  interrupted  now  and  then  by  a 
1  Ten-syllable  lines  rhyming  aba,bcb,cdc,  etc. 


320  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sudden  lull.  Likewise  in  the  " Skylark,"  the  fluttering 
lift  of  the  bird's  movement,  the  airy  ecstasy  and  rippling 
gush  of  its  song,  are  mirrored  in  the  rhythm  in  a  thou- 
sand subtly  varying  effects. 

Another  main  peculiarity  of  Shelley  as  a  poet  is  what 
may  be  called  his  " myth-making"  power.     His  poetry  is 
full  of  "personifications"  which,  although  in 
His  "Myth-     origin    not   different    from    those   which    fill 
Po^fe"8  eighteenth-century  poetry  with  dead  abstrac- 

tions like  "  smiling  Hope"  and  "ruddy  Cheer," 
are  imagined  with  such  power  that  they  become  real 
spiritual  presences,  inspiring  wonder  and  awe.  Such  are 
the  "Spirits  of  the  Hours"  in  Prometheus,  such  is  the 
spirit  of  tha  west  wind  in  the  ode  just  mentioned,  the 
latter  a  sublime  piece  of  myth-making.  It  is  in  "Ado- 
nais,"  however,  that  this  quality  is  perhaps  best  exhib- 
ited. To  mourn  over  the  dead  body  of  Keats,  in  whose 
memory  the  elegy  was  written,  there  gather  Splendors 
and  Glooms,  grief-clad  Morning  and  wailing  Spring,  deso- 
late Hours,  winged  Persuasions  and  veiled  Destinies,  and 
the  lovely  dreams  which  were  the  exhalation  of  the  poet's 
spirit,  in  life.  It  would  be  hard  to  find  a  more  signal 
instance  than  these  "personifications"  afford,  of  the  way 
in  which  a  great  poet  can  revivify  an  outworn  and  dis- 
credited poetic  tradition.  The  elegy  is  of  all  Shelley's 
poems  the  one  which  would  most  have  satisfied  Keats 's 
own  jealous  artistic  sense.  It  is  to  be  grouped  with  Mil- 
ton's Lycidas,  Tennyson's  In  Memoriam,  and  Arnold's 
Thyrsis  as  one  of  the  four  supreme  threnodies1  in  English 
verse. 

Shelley  deals  less  with  actualities  than  does  any  other 
English  poet.  His  imagery  is  that  of  a  dream-world, 
peopled  by  ethereal  forms  and  bathed  in  prismatic 
light.  Even  when  he  borrows  imagery  from  nature, 

1  Threnody,  from  two  Greek  words  signifying  "tear"  and  "song,"  ».  «., 
a  song  of  grief  for  the  dead. 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  321 

it  is  from  a  nature  heightened  and  rarefied  by  passage 
through  his  own  temperament:  He  is  at  the  other  pole 
from  Wordsworth's  homeliness  and  large  ac- 
ceptance of  nature  as  she  is.  Hence  an  air  ideality1"1' 
of  unreality  rests  over  all  Shelley's  work, 
an  unreality  made  more  conspicuous  by  his  unpractical 
theories  of  conduct  and  of  society.  Matthew  Arnold 
called  him  "a  beautiful  and  ineffectual  angel,  beating  in 
the  void  his  luminous  wings  in  vain."  But  beauty  such 
as  Shelley's  verse  embodies  cannot  be  ineffectual ;  and  his 
passionate  plea  for  freedom,  for  justice,  and  for  loving- 
kindness  has  never  ceased  to  be  potent  in  the  deepening 
earnestness  of  this  century's  search  after  social  better- 
ment, i 

One  effect  of  the  revolutionary  excitement  of  the  age, 
and  of  the  political  agitation  which  it  engendered,  was  to 
revive   the   sentiment   of   nationality,   which 
had  lost  during  the  eighteenth  century  the       5atioMi°f 
lyric  ardor  given  to  it  during  the  reign  of       Sentiment. 
Elizabeth.     In  Wordsworth's  sonnets  on  na- 
tional crises  during  the  Napoleonic  wars,  and  in  Camp- 
bell's odes,  this  new  national  sentiment  was  expressed  for 
England.     In  Scott's  poems  and  novels  it  was  expressed 
— in  a  broader,  less  political  way — for  Scotland.     Ireland 
found  a  champion  for  her  immemorial  wrongs,  and  a  re- 
flection of  her  national  peculiarities  of  tem- 
perament, in  Thomas  Moore  (1779-1852),  the  Moore, 
biographer    and    intimate    friend    of    Byron. 
Moore's  Irish  Melodies,  of  which,  beginning  in  1807,  he 
wrote  an  immense  number,  include  a  score  or  so  really 
beautiful  lyrics,  where  the  bright  fancy  and  vague,  elusive 
melancholy  of  the  Celtic  nature  find  fit  expression.     Like 
the  Elizabethan  lyrist,  Moore  wrote  for  music,  much  of 
it  of  his  own  composing.     He  shows  the  insincere  use  of 
romanticism   as   a   literary  fashion  in  his   oriental   tale, 
Lalla  Rookh  (1817),  which  is  as  artificial  in  its  candied 


322  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sweetness  and  tinsel  decoration  as  the  Irish  Melodies  are, 
when  at  their  best,  genuine. 

A  link  between  the  revolutionary  poets,  deeply  imbued 
with  the  agitation  of  their  time,  and  Keats,  in  whose  work 
L  i  hHunt  ^e  "  time"sP^t "  counts  for  almost  nothing, 
is  furnished  by  Leigh  Hunt  (1784-1859).  He 
was  intimate  with  both  Byron  and  Shelley,  and  shared 
their  radicalism.  In  1812  he  was  imprisoned  for  criticis- 
ing the  Prince  Regent;  and  during  his  imprisonment  he 
made  an  exhaustive  study  of  the  Italian  poets,  especially 
Ariosto;  the  chief  fruit  of  this  study  in  his  own  work  was 
a  narrative  poem  entitled  "Francesca  da  Rimini,"  sug- 
gested by  Dante's  account  of  the  lovers  Paolo  and  Fran- 
cesca, in  his  Inferno.  Hunt  wrote  a  vast  amount  of  criti- 
cal and  miscellaneous  prose,  among  which  his  essays  upon 
actors  and  acting  are  of  especial  interest.  At  least  one 
of  his  shorter  poems,  "Abou  Ben  Adhem,"  has  remained 
popular. 

It  was  through  Leigh  Hunt  that  Keats,  his  friend  and 
for  a  time  his  disciple,  was  led  to  the  study  of  the  Italians, 
Romantic  ^Tom  whom  he  derived,  as  Chaucer,  Spenser, 
Movement  a  and  Milton  had  done  before  him,  a  richness 
"  of  tone  and  a  Slow  of  color  that  he  could 
hardly  otherwise  have  attained.  The  Ro- 
mantic Movement  has  been  called  a  "second  Renais- 
sance"; and  it  is  a  striking  fact  that  the  two  great  sources 
of  literary  inspiration  in  the  Renaissance,  classical  and 
Italian  poetry,  furnished  to  the  later  group  of  romantic 
poets  invaluable  aid.  Byron  and  Shelley  did  their  best 
work  under  Italian  stimulus,  supplemented  in  Shelley's 
case  by  the  influence  of  Plato  and  the  Greek  dramatists. 
Keats  formed  his  manner  in  the  first  place  upon  the  Ital- 
ian poets,  and  upon  their  greatest  English  imitator, 
Spenser;  and  in  the  old  Greek  myths  he  found  the  chief 
food  for  his  imagination.  Later  he  supplemented  his 
training  with  a  study  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  323 

and  of  Milton,  in  all  of  whom  the  Italian  element  is 
strong. 

John  Keats  was  born  in  1795,  the  son  of  a  livery-stable 
keeper.  He  was  apprenticed  at  fifteen  to  learn  surgery, 
but  he  broke  his  indentures,  and  after  walk- 

,1-1  .,    ,      .       T         ,          ,.  .  ,  Keats:  His 

mg  the  hospitals  in  London  for  a  tune,  he       Life  and 
gave   up  the  medical  profession.     The  pas-       Poetic  De- 

•         f  i--i-  i-        j      •         *i-  velopment. 

sion  for  poetry,  which  was  to  be,  during  the 
brief  remainder  of  his  life,  a  consuming  ardor,  had  already 
been  kindled  in  him.  Leigh  Hunt  introduced  him  to  a 
literary  circle  where  his  dawning  talents  found  encourage- 
ment. In  1817  he  published  a  little  volume  of  verse, 
most  of  it  crude  and  immature  enough,  but  containing 
the  magnificent  sonnet  "On  First  Looking  into  Chap- 
man's Homer,"  which  reveals  one  source  of  his  inspira- 
tion. From  the  first  his  imagination  had  turned  to  the 
old  Greek  world  with  instinctive  sympathy;  and  he  now 
chose  as  the  subject  for  a  long  narrative  poem  the  story 
of  Endymion,  the  Latmian  shepherd  beloved  by  the 
moon-goddess.  Endymion  was  published  in  1818.  The 
exordium  of  the  poem,  the  Hymn  to  Pan  in  the  opening 
episode,  and  a  myriad  other  lines  and  short  passages,  are 
worthy  of  the  Keats  that  was  to  be;  but  as  a  whole  En- 
dymion is  chaotic,  and  cloyed  with  ornament.  Nobody 
knew  this  better  than  Keats  himself,  as  is  indicated 
both  by  his  letters  and  by  the  proudly  humble  preface 
in  which  he  describes  the  poem  as  a  "feverish  attempt 
rather  than  a  deed  accomplished,"  and  hopes  that  "while 
it  is  dwindling  I  may  be  plotting  and  fitting  myself  for 
verses  fit  to  live." 

To  what  purpose  he  plotted,  the  wonderful  volume  pub- 
lished two  years  later,  in  1820,  shows.  It  was  entitled 
Lamia,  Isabella,  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  and  Other  Poems; 
besides  the  pieces  named,  it  contained  the  great  odes, 
"On  Melancholy,"  "On  a  Grecian  Urn,"  "To  Psyche," 
and  "To  a  Nightingale,"  and  the  heroic  fragment,  "Hy- 


324  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

perion."  Two  years  had  done  wonders  in  deepening  and 
strengthening  his  gift.  In  turning  from  Spenser  and 
Ariosto  to  the  great  masculine  poets  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  Shakespeare,  Webster,  Milton,  and  Dryden,  he 
had  found  the  iron  which  was  lacking  in  his  earlier  intel- 
lectual food,  and  had  learned  the  lessons  of  artistic  calm- 
ness and  severity,  without  sacrifice  of  the  mellow  sweet- 
ness native  to  him;  to  charm  he  had  added  strength. 

Before  the  1820  volume  was  published,  Keats  was  at- 
tacked by  consumption,  and  had  warning  that  another 
winter  in  England  would  prove  fatal.  In  September  of 
that  year  he  sailed  for  Italy  under  the  care  of  his  faithful 
friend,  Joseph  Severn.  Early  in  the  spring  of  1821  he 
died  in  Rome,  and  was  buried  in  the  Protestant  cemetery 
by  the  Aurelian  wall,  where  Shelley,  also,  was  soon  to  be 
laid.  On  his  tomb  are  carved,  according  to  his  own  re- 
quest, the  words:  "Here  lies  one  whose  name  was  writ  in 
water."  In  a  hopefuller  time  and  in  a  mood  of  noble 
simplicity,  he  had  said:  "I  think  I  shall  be  among  the 
English  poets  after  my  death." 

The  essential  quality  of  Keats  as  a  poet  is  his  sensitive- 
ness to  beauty,  and  the  singleness  of  aim  with  which  he 
seeks  for  "the  principle  of  beauty  in  all 
things."  He  worships  beauty  for  beauty's 
sake,  with  none  of  the  secondary  moral  in- 
tentions of  Milton,  Wordsworth,  and  Shelley,  but  with 
the  unreasoning  rapture  of  a  lover  or  a  devotee.  In  his 
first  volume  he  tells  of  the  "dizzy  pain"  which  the  sight 
of  the  Elgin  marbles  gave  him,  of  the  "indescribable 
feud"  which  they  "brought  round  his  heart."  He  opens 
his  second  volume  with  the  memorable  line,  "A  thing  of 
beauty  is  a  joy  forever";  and  in  his  last  volume,  at  the 
close  of  the  ode  "On  a  Grecian  Urn,"  he  declares  that 
beauty  is  one  with  truth.  In  this  last  instance  he  at- 
tempts for  once  to  rationalize  his  instinctive  devotion; 
but  it  is  as  an  overmastering  instinct,  not  as  a  philosophic 


THE    TRIUMPH    OF   ROMANTICISM  325 

conception,  that  we  find  the  worship  of  beauty  every- 
where operative  in  his  work. 

It  is  this  passion  for  beauty,  working  through  an 
aesthetic  organism  of  extraordinary  delicacy  and  power, 
which  gives  to  Keats's  poetry  its  sensuous 
richness,  and  which  makes  it  play  magically 
upon  all  the  senses  of  the  reader.  The  pure 
glow  of  his  color  reminds  us  of  the  Italian  painter  Gior- 
gione;  and  the  music  of  his  best  verse  has  a  wonderful 
mellowness  and  depth,  as  if  blown  softly  through  golden 
trumpets.  In  the  early  poems  the  richness  is  indeed  too 
great,  the  ornament  excessive;  but  this  is  merely  the 
eager  lavishness  of  youth  rejoicing  in  its  abundance,  and 
not  yet  disciplined  into  good  taste.  From  the  first  his 
poetry  has  extraordinary  freshness,  energy,  gusto.  His 
use  of  words  is,  even  in  his  earliest  volume,  wonderfully 
fresh.  He  revived  old  words,  coined  new  ones,  and  put 
current  ones  to  a  new  service,  with  a  confidence  and  suc- 
cess unequalled  by  any  other  English  poets  except  Chau- 
cer, Shakespeare,  and  perhaps  Spenser. 

The  sense  of  form,  which  is  so  conspicuous  in  Keats's 
later  work,  was  a  matter  of  growth  with  him.  Endymion 
is  formless,  a  labyrinth  of  flowery  paths  which 
lead  nowhere.  But  the  great  odes,  especially  J?  Pom?" 
the  "Nightingale"  and  the  " Grecian  Urn," 
and  the  later  narrative  poems,  "The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes" 
and  "Lamia,"  have  a  wonderful  perfection  of  form,  a 
subordination  of  part  to  part  in  the  building  up  of  a 
beautiful  whole,  which  is  the  sign  of  the  master  workman. 
This  is  particularly  true  of  "The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,"  that 
latest  and  perhaps  most  perfect  flowering  of  the  old  Spen- 
serian tree.  The  story  of  Madeline's  dream  on  the  haunted 
eve,  of  its  magical  fulfilment  through  young  Porphyro's 
coming,  and  of  their  flight  from  the  castle,  is  set  in  a 
framework  of  storm  and  cold,  of  dreary  penance  and 
spectral  old  age,  of  barbarous  revelry  and  rude  primeval 


326  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

passion,  which  by  a  series  of  subtle  and  thrilling  contrasts 
marvellously  heightens  the  warm  and  tender  radiance  of 
the  central  picture;  then,  when  the  illusion  of  reality  is  at 
the  height,  the  whole  thing  is  thrown  back  into  the  dim 
and  doubtful  past  by  the  words 

And  they  are  gone;  ay,  ages  long  ago 
These  lovers  fled  away  into  the  storm. 

Keats's  strength,  which  we  see  in  "The  Eve  of  St. 
Agnes,"  "Lamia,"  and  the  Odes,  working  in  the  service 

of  perfect  grace,  tempted  him  in  "Hyperion" 

to  attack  a  theme  of  the  largest  epic  dimen- 
sions, the  overthrow  of  the  old  Titan  sun-deity  Hyperion 
by  the  new  sun-god  Apollo.  The  subject  proved  too  large 
for  his  undeveloped  powers,  and  he  threw  it  aside,  on  the 
ground  that  there  were  "too  many  Miltonic  inversions 
in  it."  Probably  the  deeper  reason  was  that  he  felt  as 
yet  unequal  to  the  task  of  imposing  form  upon  his  stu- 
pendous matter,  and  his  artistic  sense  would  no  longer 
permit  him  to  be  content  with  formlessness.  As  the  poem 
stands  it  is  a  superb  fragment,  an  august  portal  to  a  tem- 
ple which  will  never  be  built. 

Although  the  body  of  Keats's  work  lies  remote  from 
every-day  human  interest,  it  is  a  serious  mistake  to  think 

of  him  as  indifferent  to  human  affairs,  or  in 
Humanity.  anX  sense  effeminate.  His  wonderful  letters. 

with  their  rollicking  fun,  their  quick  human 
sympathy  and  solicitude,  their  eager  ponderings  upon  life 
and  clear  insight  into  many  of  its  dark  places,  show  a  na- 
ture vitalized  at  every  point,  and  keenly  alert  to  reality. 
Through  many  of  his  later  poems,  especially  the  great 
odes,  breathes  a  poignant  human  undertone,  which  sug- 
gests that  if  he  had  lived  he  might  have  turned  more  and 
more  to  themes  of  common  human  experience.  Dying 
as  he  did  at  twenty-five,  after  only  three  or  four  years 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  327 

of  opportunity,  he  yet  left  behind  him  a  body  of  poetry 
which  is  in  its  kind  unexcelled. 

From  the  youthful  work  of  Tennyson  and  Browning 
down  to  the  present  day,  the  poetry  of  the  Vktorian  age 
has  been  deeply  affected  in  form  and  color  by  Keats's  fas- 
cinating example.  His  importance  in  the  romantic  devel- 
opment which  we  have  been  tracing  is  twofold.  In  the 
first  place,  no  one  in  the  line  of  his  predecessors 
had  been  endowed  as  was  he  to  taste  of  all  His  P1*06  in 

i_i       i   i .  i  ,,->  i  .  the  Romantic 

earthly  delights,  to  burst  joy  s  grape  against  Movement, 
his  palate  fine,"  and  to  convey  into  verse  the 
wealth  of  his  sensations.  By  describing  life  as  it  came  to 
him  through  his  temperament,  a  temperament  most  rich 
and  delicate,  yet  most  robust,  he  greatly  widened  the  sen- 
suous realm  of  poetry.  In  the  second  place,  he  greatly 
enriched  the  texture  of  verse — its  diction  and  melody — 
by  importing  into  it  new  elements  from  Italian  and  Eliza- 
bethan poetry.  In  reclaiming  the  lost  secrets  of  Renais- 
sance verse,  he  did  consummately  what  Thomson,  Col- 
lins, Gray,  and  Blake  had  done  falteringly. 

II 

The  great  development  of  poetry  in  these  early 
years  of  the  century  was  accompanied  by  an  equally  im- 
portant movement  in  criticism.  There  had 
been  great  critics  from  the  time  of  Elizabeth  Magazines! 
— Ben  Jonson,  Dryden,  Samuel  Johnson — but 
they  had  made  their  authority  felt  in  personal  intercourse, 
or  in  occasional  publications,  such  as  Dryden's  prefaces,  or 
Johnson's  Lives  of  tlie  Poets.  The  reviews  and  magazines 
were  largely  controlled  by  publishers,  who  employed  hack 
writers  to  puff  -their  wares  and  disparage  those  of  others. 
The  first  great  modern  magazine  to  be  established  was 
the  Edinburgh  Review  in  1802,  of  which  Francis  Jeffrey 
(1773-1850)  soon  became  editor-in-chief.  He  and  his 
coeditors  insisted  on  entire  freedom  from  publishers'  influ- 


328  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ence,  though  political  prejudice  often  colored  their  criti- 
cism. Jeffrey  and  his  friends  were  Whigs;  to  offset  the 
power  which  the  rapid  success  of  the  Edinburgh  gave 
them,  the  Tories  established  The  Quarterly  Review  in 
1809,  to  which  Southey  was  for  long  a  chief  contributor. 
In  1817  was  founded  Blackwood's  Edinburgh  Magazine, 
which  was  also  Tory  in  politics,  but  more  vivacious  and 
less  responsible  than  its  contemporaries.  For  many  years 
John  Wilson  (who  wrote  over  the  name  Christopher 
North)  was  the  leading  spirit  of  Blackwood's,  contributing 
to  it  the  famous  series  of  conversations  which  he  called 
Noctes  Ambrosiance. 

The  criticism  of  Jeffrey  may  be  taken  as  typical  of  that 
of  the  reviews  in  general.     He  was  not  an  absolute  mon- 
arch, ruling  by  divine  right  in  accordance 
jefrey.  with  an  immutable  standard  set  by  the  clas- 

sics; he  was  rather  the  chief  of  an  aristocracy 
of  men  of  taste,  and  he  admitted  that  the  laws  of  taste 
varied  and  advanced.  But  as  the  spokesman  of  this 
aristocracy  he  was  as  positive  and  dogmatic  as  Doctor 
Johnson  himself.  The  motto  of  the  Edinburgh  Review, 
"the  judge  is  condemned  when  the  guilty  is  acquitted," 
shows  the  spirit  of  judicial  severity  with  which  he  exer- 
cised his  functions.  Each  author,  each  book  came  be- 
fore his  court  to  be  tried,  and,  if  necessary  for  the  public 
good,  condemned.  Wordsworth,  Scott,  Coleridge,  Shel- 
ley, and  Keats  all  fell  under  his  ban. 

In  those  days  before  the  great  modern  reading  public 
the  critical  reviews  had  immense  power,  and  they  used  it 
often  cruelly.     A  protest  was  made  by  Cole- 
R^Lmtic         ridge  m  ms  Bi°graPhia  Literaria,  in  which  he 
Critics.  insisted  that  the  function  of.  the  critic  was  to 

stand  between  the  author  and  the  public,  to 
interpret,  not  to  judge.  This  attitude  became  character- 
istic of  the  romantic  criticism  in  which  Coleridge  was 
joined  by  a  group  of  writers  who  were  all  somewhat  under 


THE    TRIUMPH    OF   ROMANTICISM  329 

the  spell  of  his  personality — Charles  Lamb,  William  Haz- 
litt,  Thomas  De  Quincey,  and  Leigh  Hunt.  This  group 
of  writers  was  distinctly  urban.  With  the  exception  of 
De  Quincey  they  lived  in  or  near  London,  and  some  of 
them  earned  the  title  of  the  Cockney  School,  in  distinc- 
tion from  the  Lake  School  of  poetry.  Without  the  ro- 
mantic resources  of  nature,  they  found  compensation  in 
literature,  which  they  approached  with  sympathetic  ap- 
preciation and  with  romantic  enthusiasm.  They  human- 
ized literary  criticism  by  introducing  an  autobiographic 
and  personal  element,  by  making  it,  in  other  words,  the 
story  of  their  own  adventures  in  the  world  of  books,  and 
an  account  of  what  they  found  there.  Thus  they  aban- 
doned the  old  dogmatic  and  judicial  criticism,  character- 
istic of  the  classical  school,  and  approached  that  modern 
attitude  which  we  call  impressionistic.  They  were  espe- 
cially drawn  to  a  field  which  abounded  in  romantic  ele- 
ments, and  the  chief  service  to  letters  in  which  they  all 
shared  was  the  recovery  and  interpretation  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan and  seventeenth-century  poets  and  dramatists — 
an  enterprise  to  which  Coleridge  contributed  his  lectures 
on  Shakespeare,  Lamb  his  Specimens  of  English  Dramatic 
Poets,  and  Hazlitt  his  series  of  lectures  on  The  Characters 
of  Shakespeare's  Plays  and  The  Dramatic  Literature  of  the 
Age,  of  Elizabeth. 

Charles  Lamb  was  born  in  London  in  1775,  and  TV  as 
brought  up  within  the  precincts  of  the  ancient  law-courts 
his  father  being  a  servant  to  an  advocate  of 
the  Inner  Temple.  From  the  cloisters  of  the 
Temple  he  was  sent  to  the  cloisters  of  Christ's 
Hospital,  where  he  had  for  a  classmate  Coleridge,  his 
lifelong  friend.1  At  seventeen  he  became  a  clerk  in  the 
India  House,  and  here  he  spent  the  working  hours  of  the 
next  thirty-three  years,  until  he  was  retired  on  a  pension 

1  See  Lamb's  "Recollections  of  Christ's  Hospital"  and  "Christ's  Hospital 
Five  and  Thirty  Years  Ago,"  in  the  Essays  of.Elia. 


330  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

in  1825.!  His  devotion  to  his  sister  Mary,  upon  whom 
rested  an  hereditary  taint  of  insanity,  has  done  almost 
as  much  as  the  sweetness  and  gentle  humor  of  his  writings 
to  endear  his  name.  He  died  in  1834,  his  sister  outliving 
him  and  gradually  sinking  into  that  mental  darkness 
from  which  his  patience  and  tenderness  had  upheld  her. 
Lamb's  first  successful  literary  venture  was  his  Tales 
from  Shakespeare  (1807),  written  in  collaboration  with 
his  sister,  and  intended  for  children.  The 
Sudsm*17  fineness  of  Lamb's  critical  gift,  which  was  at 
least  suggested  in  these  rewordings  of  Shake- 
speare's plots,  was  brilliantly  illustrated  a  year  later  by 
his  Specimens  of  English  Dramatic  Poets,  with  critical 
comments.  His  reading  in  the  Elizabethan  drama  was  ex- 
tensive, his  appreciation  of  its  qualities  subtle  and  pene- 
trating, and  his  enthusiasm  for  it  unbounded.  The  book 
did  much  to  revive  the  almost  extinguished  fame  of  the 
lesser  dramatists  grouped  about  Shakespeare.  It  is  one 
of  the  earliest  as  well  as  one  of  the  most  significant  prod- 
ucts of  the  new  romantic  criticism. 

But  it  was  not  as  a  critic  of  literature  but  as  a  com- 
mentator upon  life,  as  a  gentle  egoist,  without  a  trace  of 
vanity  or  self-assertion,  recording  his  moods, 
his  memories,  his  witty  and  tender  observa- 
tions, that  Lamb  was  to  fulfil  his  peculiar 
literary  destiny.  The  Essays  of  Elia?  published  at  in- 
tervals in  the  I^ondon  Magazine,  were  at  length  gathered 
together  and  republished  in  two  series,  the  first  in  1823, 
the  second  ten  years  later.  They  established  Lamb  in 
the  title  which  he  still  holds,  that  of  the  most  delightful 
of  English  essayists.  They  cover  a  great  variety  of  top- 
ics, but  the  approach  to  the  subject  is  always  a  personal 

*  See  Elia  Essay,  "The  Superannuated  Man." 

n-  The  pseudonym  Elia  was  borrowed  by  Lamb  from  an  Italian  clerk  in 
the  South  Sea  House  named  Ellia.  The  change  of  spelling  has  led  to  the 
broadening  of  the  initial  letter  in  pronunciation. 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  331 

one;  and  it  is  this  intimate  quality,  communicating  to 
us  by  some  intangible  suggestion  the  author's  odd  and 
lovable  personality,  which  constitutes  their  chief  charm. 

Many  of  them  are  confessions  of  personal  prejudice, 
such  as  the  essay  entitled  "Imperfect  Sympathies,"  where 
Lamb's  dislike  of  Scotchmen  and  his  taste  for 
Quakers  are  made  matter  of  delicious  mirth. 
In  "Old  China"  Lamb  gives  a  winning  picture  of  his 
home  life  with  his  sister,  who  appears  here  and  elsewhere 
as  "Cousin  Bridget."  In  "Dream  Children,"  a  beautiful 
and  deeply  affecting  essay,  he  talks  with  two  children 
conjured  from  nothingness  to  solace  for  an  hour  his 
lonely  hearth.  To  turn  from  an  essay  like  this  to  the 
famous  extravaganza  entitled  "A  Dissertation  on  Roast 
Pig,"  is  to  sound  the  full  gamut  of  Lamb's  pathos  and 
humor. 

The  style  of  these  essays  is  curiously  compounded  of 
elements  borrowed-  from  older  writers,  especially  from 
Burton  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne.  But  in  . 

.  Their  style. 

passing  through  Lamb  s  temperament  these 
elements  are  fused  into  a  style  wholly  new  and  individual, 
betraying  its  remote  origin  only  by  a  certain  rareness 
and  charming  quaintness  of  flavor.  The  Elia  papers  con- 
tinue the  traditions  of  essay  writing  fixed  by  Addison 
and  Steele,  but  their  range  is  wider,  and  their  treatment 
of  human  life  is  marked  by  the  more  searching  pathos, 
the  more  sensitive  and  flashing  humor,  which  belonged 
to  Lamb  as  a  partaker  in  the  spiritual  awakening  of  the 
nineteenth  century. 

The  romantic  tinge  of  Lamb's  mind  is  the  more  note- 
worthy because,  like  the  eighteenth-century  men  from 
whom  he  borrowed  the  idea  of  the  essay,  he  cared  little 
for  natural  beauty,  and  was  essentially  an  urban  spirit. 
London,  its  streets,  its  shops,  its  theatres,  was  the  place 
of  his  affection,  and  he  has  pictured  many  of  the  phases 
of  its  life  with  the  vividness  that  comes  from  personal 


332  A  HISTORY   OP   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

delight.  In  him  we  see,  in  a  very  curious  and  striking 
way,  the  increment  of  romantic  sensibility  infused  into 
and  transforming  a  nature  belonging  in  many  respects 
to  the  age  of  the  Queen  Anne  wits. 

Quite  the  opposite  of  Lamb  in  temperament,  but  like 
him  a  romantic  essayist  and  critic,  is  William  Hazlitt 
(1778-1830).  Hazlitt's  father  was  a  Unita- 
"an  clergyman  who  held  several  parishes  in 
America  after  the  Revolution.  In  1798  he 
was,  however,  settled  at  Wem,  in  Shropshire,  where  Cole- 
ridge, at  that  time  also  a  preacher  of  the  same  persuasion, 
came  to  visit  him.  Hazlitt  has  left  a  vivid  portrait  of 
Coleridge  at  that  time  in  his  essay  "My  First  Acquain- 
tance with  Poets,"  and  a  still  more  vivid  account  of  the 
stimulating  influence  of  his  conversation.  It  was  under 
this  energizing  influence  that  Hazlitt  became  a  critic  of 
art,  literature,  and  politics.  He  contributed  much  by 
his  lectures  to  arouse  interest  in  the  Elizabethan  writers; 
he  championed  the  liberal  cause  in  politics  during  the 
years  of  Tory  reaction;  he  even  wrote  a  eulogistic  life  of 
Napoleon.  But  he  is  chiefly  remembered  for  the  mis- 
cellaneous essays,  in  which  he  touched  various  aspects  of 
life,  such  as  "The  Fight,"  " Going  on  a  Journey,"  "On 
Actors  and  Acting,"  "On  the  Look  of  a  Gentleman," 
"On  the  Pleasures  of  Painting."  These  he  contributed 
to  various  periodicals  and  afterward  collected  in  vol- 
umes, Table  Talk,  The  Round  Table,  etc.  They  reveal 
the  breadth  and  variety  of  his  interests,  and  the  energy 
with  which  he  pursued  them — a  full-hearted  zest  quite 
different  from  the  quiet  humor  of  Charles  Lamb. 

Hazlitt  carried  the  same  spirit  into  his  enjoyment  of 
literature.  He  often  introduces  us  to  authors  and  to 
Hazlitt's  books  by  telling  us  the  story  of  his  own  ac- 
Criticism.  quaintance  with  them,  recalling  with  infinite 
gusto  the  sensations  which  they  gave  him. 
Of  Tom  Jones  he  tells  us:  "It  came  down  in  numbers 


THE   TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  333 

once  a  fortnight,  in  Cooke's  pocket  edition,  embellished 
with  cuts.  I  had  hitherto  read  only  in  school-books  .  .  . 
but  this  had  a  different  relish  with  it — 'sweet  in  the 
mouth,'  though  not  'bitter  in  the  belly.'  It  smacked  of 
the  world  I  lived  in,  and  in  which  I  was  to  live — and 
showed  me  groups,  'gay  creatures,'  not  'of  the  element,' 
but  of  the  earth;  not  'living  in  the  clouds,'  but  travelling 
the  same  road  that  I  did.  .  .  .  My  heart  had  palpitated 
at  the  thoughts  of  a  boarding-school  ball,  or  a  gala-day 
at  Midsummer  or  Christmas;  but  the  world  I  had  found 
out  in  Cooke's  Edition  of  the  British  Novelists  was  to  me 
a  dance  through  life,  a  perpetual  gala-day."  There  is 
something  spontaneous  and  contagious  about  such  criti- 
cism; the  reader  is  led  on  by  the  mood  of  the  writer.  It 
is  in  this  impressionistic  attitude  toward  literature  that 
Hazlitt  anticipates  critics  of  a  later  generation,  especially 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

Hazlitt  chose  the  unpopular  side  in  politics;  he  was  un- 
lucky in  love  and  marriage,  and  he  quarrelled  furiously 
with  his  friends,  even  Charles  Lamb  and 
Leigh  Hunt.  He  needed  all  the  compensa- 
tions  that  art  and  literature  could  give  him. 
He  is,  indeed,  in  many  ways  quite  the  opposite  of  Charles 
Lamb,  being  somewhat  coarse  and  boisterous  where 
Lamb  is  refined  and  subtle;  often  harsh  and  repellent 
where  Lamb  is  gentle  and  winning.  His  style  is  more 
obvious  than  Lamb's,  with  more  direct  emphasis  and  the 
embellishment  of  many  quotations.  Like  Lamb's,  how- 
ever, it  is  eminently  personal  and  intimate,  and  has  often 
a  true  note  of  pathos  in  its  revelation  of  the  author's 
disappointed  life.  "So  have  I  loitered  my  life  away," 
he  writes,  "reading  books,  looking  at  pictures,  going  to 
pj-iys,  hearing,  thinking,  or  writing  on  what  pleased  me 
best.  I  have  wanted  only  one  thing  to  make  me  happy; 
but  wanting  that  have  wanted  everything." 

In  Thomas  De  Quincey  the  romantic  element  is  even 


334 


A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 


more  pronounced,  and  displays  itself  not  only  in  his 
writings  but  in  the  circumstances  of  his  life.  He  was 
born  in  Manchester  in  1785,  the  son  of  a  pros- 
S°oUfaicey.  Perous  merchant  in  the  foreign  trade.  At  six- 
teen he  ran  away  from  the  Manchester  gram- 
mar-school, and  spent  a  summer  wandering  in  North 
Wales,  often  sleeping  on  the  open  hills  or  in  the  tents  of 
gypsies.  When  the  cold  weather  came  on,  he  made  his  way 
to  London,  where  he  led  a  starved  and  vagrant  existence, 
until  he  was  reclaimed  by  his  family  and  sent  to  Oxford. 
He  was  one  of  the  earliest  converts  to  the  "Lake  poetry," 
and  after  leaving  college  he  established  himself  at  Gras- 
mere,  in  the  neighborhood  of  Wordsworth  and  Southey. 
Here  he  lived  for  more  than  twenty  years,  reading  pro- 
digiously and  eating  vast  quantities  of  opium.  By  reason 
of  some  peculiarity  of  his  constitution  the  drug  was  less 
fatal  in  its  workings  than  is  commonly  the  case;  but  the 
splendid  and  tumultuous  dreams  which  it  brought  were 
paid  for  by  periods  of  awful  gloom  and  lassitude.  In  his 
thirty-first  year  De  Quincey  married.  Forced  to  earn 
money  by  his  pen,  he  published  in  1821-1822  the  famous 
Confessions  of  an  English  Opium-Eater,  and  from  this 
time  forth  he  poured  out  magazine  articles  on  almost 
every  conceivable  topic.  In  1830  he  removed,  with  his 
wife  and  children,  to  Edinburgh,  where  he  resided  until 
his  death  in  1859. 

His  best-known  work  is  also  his  most  characteristic,  the 
Opium-Eater  and  its  sequel,  Suspiria  de  Profundis.     Only 
a  small  portion  of  the  Opium- Eater  deals  with 
ofCa^oX£!    the  subJect  of  opium-taking.     It  is  an  ex- 
Eater."  tended  autobiography,  covering  the  life  of  the 
author  from  early  childhood   to   about   the 
year  1819,  when  his  bondage  to  opium  became  absolute, 
and  he  descended  into  the  valley  of  the  shadow,  where 
he  was  to  gather  the  dolorous  matter  of  his  Suspiria. 
The  most  powerful  portion  of  the  narrative,  aside  from 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  335 

the  description  of  his  opium-sensations,  is  that  which 
tells  of  his  life  of  vagrancy  and  starvation  in  London,  and 
of  his  nightly  wanderings  with  "poor  Ann"  through  the 
crowded  desolation  of  Oxford  Street.  The  Suspiria  de 
Profundis  (Sighs  from  the  Depths)  is  made  up  mainly  of 
dream-phantasies  transcribed  from  the  actual  wanderings 
of  his  mind  under  the  spell  of  opium,  or  suggested  by 
them. 

In  such  phantasmagoric  imaginings  as  "Levana  and 
'Our  Ladies  of  Sorrow,"  in  the  Suspiria,  and  the  "Dream- 
Fugue"  appended  to  the  English  M ail-Coach, 
De  Quincey  ventured  upon  a  new  domain  of  terfstic  Istyie 
imaginative  prose;  a  region  audaciously  won 
from  verse,  to  which,  by  virtue  of  its  impassioned  and 
ideal  character,  it  properly  belongs.  His  studies  of 
Elizabethan  prose-writers  may  have  given  him  the  hint; 
but  he  carried  out  as  a  deliberate  experiment  what  with 
them  had  been  an  unconscious  confusion  of  the  cate- 
gories of  prose  and  verse.  In  doing  so  he  revealed  new 
possibilities  in  the  English  tongue.  The  following  pas- 
sage from  the  Opium-Eater  will  illustrate  the  poetical 
quality  of  his  style.  It  describes  a  series  of  dreams  sug- 
gested by  the  sight  of  a  mysterious  Malay,  who  appeared 
one  day  at  De  Quincey 's  door:  "I  brought  together  all 
creatures,  birds,  beasts,  reptiles,  that  are  found  in  all 
tropical  regions.  ...  I  was  stared  at,  hooted  at,  grinned 
at,  chattered  at,  by  monkeys,  by  paroquets,  by  cocka- 
toos. I  ran  into  pagodas,  and  was  fixed  for  centuries  at 
the  summit,  or  in  secret  rooms;  I  was  the  idol;  I  was  the 
priest;  I  was  worshipped;  I  was  sacrificed.  I  fled  from 
the  wrath  of  Brama  through  all  the  forests  of  Asia;  Vishnu 
hated  me;  Seeva  lay  in  wait  for  me.  I  came  suddenly 
upon  Isis  and  Osiris:  I  had  done  a  deed,  they  said,  which 
the  ibis  and  the  crocodile  trembled  at.  Thousands  of 
years  I  lived  and  was  buried  in  stone  coffins,  with  mum- 
mies and  sphinxes,  in  narrow  chambers  at  the  heart  of 


336  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

eternal  pyramids.  I  was  kissed,  with  cancerous  kisses, 
by  crocodiles,  and  was  laid,  confounded  with  all  unutter- 
able abortions,  arnongst  reeds  and  Nilotic  mud."  Upon 
this  and  similar  passages  of  richly  wrought,  chanting 
prose,  De  Quincey's  fame  as  a  writer  rests.  The  qualities 
of  style  exhibited  in  them  have  had  a  great  influence  upon 
the  prose-writing  of  the  century,  an  influence  which  can 
be  traced  in  such  widely  different  writers  as  Bulwer  and 
Ruskin.' 

Two  serious   charges  are  to  be  brought  against  De 
Quincey  as  a  writer — diffuseness  and  triviality.     He  can- 
not resist  the  slightest  temptation  to  digress, 

Ma  Writer.  anc*  even  m  ^e  most  solemn  pages  of  his 
Confessions,  and  in  the  midst  of  the  touching 
story  of  Joan  of  Arc's  childhood,  he  is  capable  of  falling 
into  a  queer  kind  of  "rigmarole"  made  up  of  pedantry 
and  mirthless  jesting.  In  reading  him  we  are  often  vis- 
ited by  an  uncomfortable  sense  of  dealing  with  a  nature 
not  quite  responsible  and  not  quite  human.  He  illus- 
trates both  the  defects  and  the  virtues  of  the  romantic 
temper;  its  virtues  in  the  enkindled  splendor  of  his  fancy 
and  the  impassioned  sweep  of  his  style;  its  defects  in  his 
extravagance,  his  unevenness,  his  failure  to  exercise  ade- 
quate self-criticism. 

During  the  period  of  lull  following  the  death  of  Byron 
and  preceding  the  outburst  of  the  new  Victorian  litera- 
ture, a  decided  reaction  from  the  romantic  to 

Reutira  in  the  classic  ideal  is  seen  m  Walter  Savage  Lan- 
Landor.  dor.  In  him  this  reaction  is  the  more  note- 

worthy because  he  began  as  a  romantic  poet 
of  the  extreme  type,  and  wrote  romantic  dramas  until  a 
year  or  two  before  Byron's  death;  when  he  began  to  cul- 
tivate the  classical,  dignified,  restrained  prose  for  which 
his  name  is  famous. 

Lander's  life  was  a  very  long  one.     Born  in  1775,  he 
published  an  important  poem,  Gebir,  in   1798,  a  short 


THE   TRIUMPH  OF  ROMANTICISM  337 

while  before  the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge heralded  the  triumph  of  the  Romantic  Movement. 
Gebir  is  a  fantastic  narrative,  conceived  in  a 
mood  of  wild  romanticism  such  as  only  Shel-  ¥^°T>S 
ley  could  rival;  upon  Shelley,  indeed,  the 
poem  had  a  strong  influence.  If  Landor  had  had,  at  this 
earlier  period,  greater  artistic  poise  and  sureness,  Gebir 
and  not  the  Lyrical  Ballads  might  now  be  held  to  signalize 
the  triumph  of  the  new  romantic  poetry.  But  the  poem 
is  incoherent  and  immature,  and  in  spite  of  many  beauties 
is  a  failure.  It  lies  outside  Lander's  characteristic  work, 
as  do  likewise  the  efforts  which  he  made  during  the  next 
twenty-five  years  in  the  romantic  drama.  It  was  not 
until  his  forty-sixth  year  that  he  found  his  genuine  man- 
ner, and  began  to  produce  work  of  permanent  beauty. 
In  1821  he  went  to  Italy  and  settled  near  Florence,  on 
the  slope  of  Fiesole,  in  a  beautiful  villa,  the  garden  of 
which,  full  of  clouds  of  olive-trees  and  spires  of  cypress, 
commanded  a  magnificent  view  of  the  valley  of  the  Arno 
and  the  far- stretching  hills  of  Tuscany.  Here  he  wrote 
most  of  those  lofty  and  serene  works  by  which  he  will 
be  remembered,  especially  the  Imaginary  Conversations 
(1824-1846)  and  Pericles  and  Aspasia  (1836). 

The  vitality  of  Landor's  genius  in  old  age  is  almost 
without  parallel.  At  seventy  he  published  a  series  of 
poems  on  subjects  from  old  Greek  life,  which  have  all  the 
freshness  and  spontaneous  joy  of  youth.  At  least  one  of 
these,  the  "Hamadryad,"  should  be  read  in  connection 
with  the  loveliest  of  Landor's  youthful  lyrics,  "Rose 
Aylmer,"  in  order  that  the  persistence  of  his  freshness  of 
feeling  through  a  literary  career  of  fifty  years  may  be  ap- 
preciated. He  died  in  1864,  long  after  his  early  contem- 
poraries had  passed  away,  and  a  new  generation  of  writers 
had  arisen,  with  new  aims  and  ideals.  His  literary  life 
covered  the  immense  span  from  the  earliest  work  of 
Wordsworth  to  the  Atalanta  in  Calydon  of  Swinburne. 


338  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

His  personal  life,  in  curious  contrast  with  the  serenity  and 
classic  poise  of  his  best  work,  was  one  of  constant  storm, 
of  furious  quarrels,  and  eccentric  outbursts  of  temper. 
There  is  something  pathetic  in  the  unconscious  irony  of 
the  opening  line  of  the  quatrain  in  which  he  took  leave  of 
earth: 

I  strove  with  none,  for  none  was  worth  my  strife: 
Nature  I  loved,  and  next  to  Nature,  Art; 
I  warmed  both  hands  before  the  fire  of  life; 
It  sinks,  and  I  am  ready  to  depart. 

In  the  Imaginary  Conversations,  Landor  brings  together 

significant  personalities,  from  all  lands  and  all  periods  of 

history,  sometimes  in  couples,  sometimes  in 

The"imagi-    }arger  groups,  and  represents   them  in  talk 

nary  Conver-          .  ,  ,  _,t        0  ,    T        ,  . 

sations."  with  one  another.  The  Saxon  earl  Leofnc 
talks  with  his  bride  Godiva  as  they  ride  into 
Coventry;  /Esop,  the  Phrygian  fable-writer,  talks  with 
Rhodope,  a  young  Greek  slave-girl,  in  the  house  of  their 
Egyptian  master;  Henry  the  Eighth  talks  with  Anne 
Boleyn  in  her  prison;  Dante  talks  with  Beatrice  in  a  Flor- 
entine garden  in  spring;  the  young  Marcellus,  wounded 
to  death,  confronts  for  a  moment  the  conquering  Hanni- 
bal. For  the  most  part,  the  characters  which  Landor 
evokes  are  lofty  and  magnanimous  ones;  and  the  dia- 
logue shows  no  attempt  at  dramatic  realism,  but  is 
always  stately,  pure,  and  exquisitely  finished.  Nothing 
is  allowed  to  interfere  with  the  classical  precision  and 
chaste  rhythmic  beauty  of  the  style.  In  a  sense,  all  the 
characters  of  the  Conversations  talk  alike,  using  a  diction 
and  idiom  removed  from  the  realities  of  daily  speech, 
and  suggesting  their  individuality  only  by  the  more 
subtle  differences  of  their  thought  and  action.  There 
is  a  certain  aloofness  and  austerity  in  Lander's  man- 
ner which  often  repel  the  reader  on  first  acquaintance, 
but  which,  when  once  accepted,  rather  add  to  than 


THE    TRIUMPH   OF   ROMANTICISM  339 

•  lessen  his  pleasure.  The  purpose  which  lurks  behind  the 
Conversations,  too,  is  usually  as  nobly  and  calmly  serious 
as  the  style.  It  is  these  three  characteristics,  loftiness  of 
character,  dignity  of  style,  and  nobility  of  purpose,  which 
make  the  Imaginary  Conversations  classic,  in  the  broader 
sense  of  the  word;  and  which  make  them,  after  Milton's 
poetry,  perhaps  the  best  substitute  afforded  by  English 
literature  for  a  training  in  the  Greek  and  Latin  writers. 

In  Pericles  and  Aspasia  Land  or  substituted  for  the 
conversational  manner  the  epistolary.  In  a  series  of  fa- 
miliar letters  passing  between  the  major  and 
the  minor  characters  of  the  book,  we  are  told  "  Pericles 
how  Aspasia,  a  young  woman  of  Asia  Minor,  Spasia." 
comes  to  Athens,  then  at  the  height  of  its 
splendor  under  Ihe  wise  rule  of  Pericles; -how  she  meets 
the  great  leader,  and  comes  to  know,  on  terms  of  intimate 
friendship,  Alcibiades,  Socrates,  and  many  other  famous 
men  of  the  age.  We  are  given  thus,  in  a  delightfully 
natural  and  casual  way,  a  picture  of  the  intellectual  capi- 
tal of  the  antique  world  in  its  heyday,  a  picture  which 
makes  the  Athens  of  Pericles  seem  wonderfully  near  at 
hand  and  comprehensible.  Aspasia,  as  she  reveals  her- 
self in  her  letters,  is  a  triumph  of  feminine  portraiture. 
Her  playfulness,  her  wit,  her  girlish  adventurousness,  her 
unpedantic  delight  in  intellectual  things,  the  womanly 
way  in  which  her  nature  rises  and  sobers  itself  to  meet 
the  grave  nature  of  Pericles,  all  combine  harmoniously 
to  make  a  woman  such  as  Shakespeare  might  have  created. 

From  the  death  of  Byron  in  1824  until  the  decisive 
appearance  of  Tennyson  in  1842,  there  was  a  period  of 
comparative  exhaustion  in  English  literature. 
Keats  and  Shelley  were  dead;  Coleridge  was    J^^* 
'lost   in    metaphysics,    and   Wordsworth    had    Era. 
almost   ceased   to  produce  poetry   of  value; 
Scott  died  in  1832,  and  the  best  work  of  Lamb  was  done 
before  that  date.     The  first  great  wave  of  romanticism, 


340  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

which  had  begun  to  rise  a  century  before,  with  Thomson 
and  Gray,  and  which  had  reached  its  height  in  the  first 
two  decades  of  the  nineteenth  century,  had  passed  by. 
During  this  period  of  lull,  the  new  forces  which  were  to 
go  to  the  making  of  literature  during  the  reign  of  Vic- 
toria were  gathering  head.  Tennyson,  Browning,  and 
Carlyle  had  already  appeared;  and,  although  they  re- 
mained as  yet  comparatively  obscure,  they  were  doing 
some  of  their  greatest  work.  Thomas  Hood  (1798-1845) 
in  his  " Bridge  of  Sighs"  and  "Song  of  the  Shirt"  had 
struck  the  note  of  humanitarian  sympathy  with  the  un- 
fortunate and  oppressed,  which  was  to  swell  in  volume 
and  depth  through  the  whole  course  of  Victorian  litera- 
ture. We  must  now  consider  what  other  distinctive  ele- 
ments went  to  the  making  of  that  literature,  gigantic  in 
bulk  and  almost  infinite  in  variety,  which  places  the  era 
of  Victoria  beside  that  of  Elizabeth. 


CHAPTER   XIV 

THE    NINETEENTH   CENTURY:    THE    VICTORIAN   ERA 

THE  literature  of  the  long  reign  of  Victoria  (1837-1001) 
presents  the  features  natural  in  an  era  of  great  social 
change  and  intellectual  advancement.  Never 
before,  not  even  in  the  troubled  seventeenth 
century,  have  there  been  such  rapid  and 
sweeping  changes  in  the  social  fabric  of  the 
English-speaking  races;  and  never  before  has 
literature  been  so  closely  in  league,  or  so  openly  at  war, 
with  the  forces  of  social  life.  Among  the  many  circum- 
stances making  for  change,  the  chief  one  has  been  the 
growth  of  democracy.  The  Reform  Bill  of  1832  placed 
the  political  power  of  England  in  the  hands  of  the  middle 
class,  and  since  that  date  there  has  been  a  gradual  exten- 
sion of  the  suffrage  to  the  working  classes.  With  the 
growth  of  democracy  have  gone  the  spread  of  popular  edu- 
cation, and  a  great  increase  in  the  number  of  readers  of 
books.  A  vast  body  of  people  who  heretofore  had  little 
or  no  access  to  literature  have  been  reached  by  it,  and 
have  in  turn  influenced  its  character.  Almost  all  the 
great  Victorian  writers  have  been  absorbed  in  the  attempt 
to  move,  instruct,  or  inspire  the  huge,  unleavened  mass 
of  society.  The  astonishing  development  of  the  mechani- 
cal arts  and  of  commerce,  while  it  has  increased  the  com- 
forts of  living,  has  led  to  an  absorption  in  material  inter- 
ests against  which  nearly  every  great  writer  has  lifted  his 
voice  in  protest  and  warning.  The  discoveries  of  science 
have  thrown  into  the  world  a  multitude  of  conceptions 
of  the  most  revolutionary  kind,  unsettling  many  of  the 
old  bases  of  religious  belief,  and  affecting  literature  in 
numberless  ways.  Along  with  these  causes  of  change 
341 


342  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

there  has  gone,  also,  a  restless  search  after  some  new  form 
of  society,  or  some  modification  of  the  old  forms,  by 
which  the  claims  of  all  men  to  life  and  opportunity  should 
be  met.  Social  unrest  is  the  great  distinguishing  feature, 
of  the  Victorian  era;  and  the  demand  for  social  justice 
has  colored,  in  one  way  or  another,  the  whole  thought 
of  the  time. 

It  follows  from  all  this  that  the  most  striking  charac- 
teristic of  Victorian  literature  is  its  strenuousness,  its 
conscious  purpose.  Both  poets  and  prose- 
writers  have  worked  under  the  shadow  and 
burden  of  a  conscious  social  responsibility. 
Almost  all  of  them  have  been  makers  of  doctrine,  preach- 
ers of  some  crusade,  or  physicians  offering  some  cure  for 
man's  perplexities  and  despairs.  Instead  of  the  light- 
hearted  interest  in  life  which  the  Elizabethans  show,  in- 
stead of  the  transcendental  dreaming  of  the  generation  of 
Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Shelley,  and  Keats,  we  find  as 
the  prevailing  mood  an  earnest  and  often  troubled  facing 
of  the  issues  of  life,  which  are  recognized  to  be  momentous. 
Nevertheless,  the  romantic  impulse  persists.  There  are 
some  minor  reversions  to  classicism,  but,  taken  largely, 
literature  has  continued  to  be  romantic,  in 
Romanticism.  tne  novelty  and  variety  of  its  form,  in  its 
search  after  undiscovered  springs  of  beauty 
and  truth,  in  its  emotional  and  imaginative  intensity. 
Especially  is  this  romantic  impulse  seen  in  the  effort  to 
bring  to  light  the  unusual  and  surprising  elements  in  real 
and  commonplace  things,  to  startle  men  out  of  their 
acceptance  of  such  things  as  typical  and  -conventional. 
Even  in  its  realism  the  age  has  been,  on  the  whole,  roman- 
tic. In  fact,  the  whole  literary  effort  of  the  Victorian 
age  may  be  conceived  of  as  an  effort  to  open  to  the  masses 
of  men  those  sources  of  romantic  feeling  which  in  the 
early  part  of  the  century  were  known  only  to  a  few  privi- 
leged souls. 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  343 

At  the  opening  of  the  period  stands  a  writer  who  per- 
fectly represents  the  spirit  in  which  the  moderate  reform 
of  1832  had  been  won,  and  the  satisfaction 
with  which  its  authors  regarded  their  work. 
Thomas  Babington  Macaulay  was  born  in  1800,  of  Scotch 
and  Quaker  ancestry.  At  Cambridge,  in  the  midst  of 
the  political  excitement  which  led  up  to  the  Reform  Bill, 
he  took  a  middle  position  between  Tory  and  Radical, 
intrenching  himself  in  the  Whig  principles  of  liberal 
conservatism,  of  which  he  was  all  his  life  a  powerful  and 
watchful  champion.  At  college  he  distinguished  himself 
as  a  writer  and  debater;  and  in  1825  his  famous  essay 
on  Milton  appeared  in  The  Edinburgh  Review,  followed 
by  other  essays  which  fastened  attention  upon  him  as  a 
new  force  in  literature.  At  thirty  he  entered  Parliament, 
in  time  to  take  a  conspicuous  part  in  the  passage  of  the 
Reform  Bill.  Four  years  later  he  went  to  India  as  legal 
adviser  to  the  Supreme  Council,  returning  in  1838  to  play 
once  more  a  leading  role  in  Parliament,  until  his  de- 
feat in  1847.  During  these  nine  years  appeared  several 
of  his  most  famous  essays,  notably  those  on  the  Indian 
proconsuls,  Clive  and  Warren  Hastings.  In  1842  he 
published  his  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  dignified  and  vig- 
orous celebrations,  in  ballad  verse,  of  the  antique  civic 
virtues,  as  shown  in  Horatius,  Virginius,  and  other  Roman 
worthies.  The  next  year,  after  long  delay,  he  began  to 
realize  the  dream  of  his  life,  in  the  publication  of  the 
first  part  of  Jiis  History  of  England.  He  accomplished, 
in  the  five  completed  volumes  of  his  history,  only  a  frag- 
ment of  the  task  which  he  had  set  himself.  He  died  in 

1859-  . 

Gladstone  bears  testimony  that  an  announcement  ot 
Macaulay 's  intention  to  speak  in  Parliament  was  "like  a 
trumpet-call  to  fill  the  benches."  His  power  as  an  orator 
furnishes  the  key  to  what  is  most  characteristic  in  his 
essays.  In  a  speech  the  meaning  must  be  so  clearly 


344  A  HISTORY    OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

stated,  so  aptly  illustrated,  so  skilfully  repeated  and  re- 
emphasized,  that  misunderstanding  shall  be  impossible; 
and  the  flagging  attention  of  the  audience 
His  Essays:     mUst  be  continually  stimulated  bv  strong  con- 

Their  Style  ..  .       J        .  ,  J,   ,          &  .„ 

and  Matter,  trasts,  by  striking  antitheses,  and  by  an  illu- 
sion of  rapidity,  even  where  the  movement  is, 
by  the  necessity  of  the  subject,  slow.  Suggestiveness,  del- 
icate shades  of  meaning  of  a  sort  to  make  the  hearer  hesi- 
tate and  ponder,  defeat  the  ends  of  parliamentary  dis- 
course; high  imaginativeness,  strong  appeal  to  the  more 
mystical  and  spiritual  sides  of  man's  nature,  are  here  out 
of  place.  Everything  must  be  open,  sensible,  emphatic. 
In  all  these  respects  Macaulay's  essays  are  true  to  the 
type  of  parliamentary  speaking.  Probably  no  writer  has 
ever  been  more  skilful  than  Macaulay  in  making  his 
whole  meaning  clear;  none  more  successful  in  keeping 
the  reader's  mind  awake,  and  his  sense  of  movement 
agreeably  satisfied.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  few  writers 
of  the  century  have  been  so  limited  to  considerations  of 
actual  fact.  He  is  always  downright  and  positive,  never 
in  doubt,  and  never  at  a  loss.  Mystics  like  Plato,  masters 
of  pure  thought  like  Bacon,  complex  religious  natures 
like  Doctor  Johnson,  fare  badly  at  his  hands.  But  his 
defects  served  him  perhaps  as  much  as  his  virtues  in  his 
work  of  popularizing  knowledge.  From  the  stores  of  his 
capacious  memory,  one  of  the  most  marvellous  on  record, 
he  presented  in  lucid  and  entertaining  form  a  great  mass 
of  fact  and  opinion,  the  educative  power  yf  which  was 
and  still  continues  to  be  very  great. 

In  his  History  he  carried  his  popularizing  zeal  into  a 
more  difficult  field,  and  scored  even  a  more  notable  suc- 

"  ffisto  CeSS'     ^*S  a*m  Was  to  w"te  a  history  of  Eng- 

Engiand7'°      land  from  the  accession  of  James  II  to  the 
end  of  George  IV's  reign,  in  a  manner  so  con- 
crete, picturesque,  and  dramatic,  that  his  narrative  of 
actual  events  should  have  the  fascination  of  romance; 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  345 

and,  as  he  himself  put  the  case,  should  have  the  power 
"to  supersede  the  last  fashionable  novel  upon  the  dress- 
ing-table of  young  ladies."  The  portion  of  the  story 
which  he  lived  to  complete  is,  in  fact,  presented  with  a 
wealth  and  minuteness  of  detail  concerning  particular 
persons,  places,  and  events,  such  as  a  writer  of  fiction 
uses  to  embody  the  creations  of  his  fancy.  We  do  not 
find  in  Macaulay  a  profound  view  of  underlying  causes, 
that  large  intellectual  interpretation  of  events  which 
constitutes  the  "philosophy  of  history";  but  in  recom- 
pense he  gives  us  a  fascinating  story,  a  broad  and  lumi- 
nous canvas  covered  with  firmly  delineated  pictures, 
which  change  before  our  eyes  into  new.  groupings,  and 
give  place  to  other  spectacles,  as  in  a  magic  diorama. 

Macaulay 's  essays  were  chiefly  written  between  1825 
and  1840,  in  the  period  of  lull  which  followed  the  roman- 
tic outburst  of  the  early  part  of  the  century. 
This  was  also  the  period  of  great  industrial  ^J^Se. 
and  commercial  expansion,  when  material 
prosperity  was  bringing  the  middle  class  into  power.  The 
Reform  Bill  of  1832  gave  this  class  a  large  share  in  the 
representative  government  of  England,  and  was  regarded 
by  many  as  a  final  step  in  accommodating  the  political 
institutions  of  the  country  to  the  legitimate  demands  of 
the  people.  Macaulay  at  heart  was  well  satisfied  with 
the  results  of  his  own  time.  In  his  complacent  view  of 
life,  as  well  as  in  his  pointed,  emphatic  style,  he  reflects 
the  character  of  this  period,  when  men  were  inclined  to 
exchange  the  idealistic  longings  and  aspirations  of  the 
previous  era  for  a  satisfied  acceptance  of  the  practical 
benefits  which  commerce,  liberal  government,  and  the 
mechanical  sciences  were  bringing  to  English  life.  In  his 
essay  on  Bacon  he  contrasts  the  aims  of  philosophy  in  the 
days  of  Plato  and  Seneca  with  that  practical  application 
of  knowledge  which  it  was  part  of  Bacon's  system  to  fur- 
ther. "The  aim  of  Platonic  philosophy,"  he  says,  "was 


346  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

to  exalt  man  into  a  god.  The  aim  of  the  Baconian  phi- 
losophy was  to  provide  man  with  what  he  requires  while 
he  continues  to  be  man.  ...  An  acre  in  Middlesex  is 
better  than  a  principality  in  Utopia.  The  smallest  ac- 
tual good  is  better  than  the  most  magnificent  promises 
of  impossibilities.  The  wise  man  of  the  Stoics  would 
no  doubt  be  a  grander  object  than  a  steam-engine.  But 
there  are  steam-engines.  And  the  wise  man  of  the  Stoics 
is  yet  to  be  born." 

In  all  this  Macaulay  offers  a  striking  contrast  to  the 
later  social  criticism  of  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  and  Matthew 
Arnold,  who  united  in  bidding  men  ponder  what  their 
boasted  progress  was  progress  toward,  and  whether,  in 
their  zeal  for  worship  of  the  steam-engine  and  the  ballot- 
box,  they  were  not  perchance  bowing  down  to  heathen 
idols,  forgetting  the  God  of  the  spirit.  Before  con- 
sidering their  protest  against  materialism,  however,  we 
must  take  account  of  a  somewhat  earlier  one  in  the  field 
of  religion,  which  had  an  important  influence  on  litera- 
ture— the  Oxford  Movement,  led  by  John  Henry  New- 
man. 

Newman  was  born  in  London  in  1801.  He  went  to 
Oxford,  was  elected  a  fellow  of  Oriel  College,  and  took  or- 
john  He  ^CTS  *u  tne  English  Church,  becoming  vicar  of 
Newman  and  Saint  Mary's  Church  in  the  university  city, 
the  Oxford  jje  was  cioseiy  associated  with  a  group  of 

Movement.  .  * 

friends  whose  object  came  to  be  to  reclaim 
the  Church  of  England  from  the  torpor  and  deadness  into 
which  it  had  fallen,  and  to  give  it  once  more  the  poetry, 
the  mystic  symbolism,  the  spiritual  power,  and  the 
beauty  of  architecture,  ritual,  and  service  which  had 
characterized  the  Catholic  Church  in  the  Middle  Age.  In 
this  respect  the  Oxford  Movement  was  an  outgrowth  of 
the  Romantic  Movement.  Newman  himself  states  that 
it  owed  much  to  Scott,  "who  turned  men's  minds  in  the 
direction  of  the  Middle  Ages,"  as  well  as  to  Coleridge, 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  347 

Sou  they,  and  Wordsworth.  Newman  and  his  friends 
wished  also  to  defend  the  church,  in  view  of  its  divine 
character,  against  the  interference  of  the  state,  which  was 
disposed  to  reform  it  along  with  Parliament  and  other 
institutions,  curtailing  its  powers  and  revenues.  The 
original  inspiration  of  the  movement  was  given  by  John 
Keble  (1792-1866),  whose  volume  of  devotional  verse, 
The  Christian  Year  (1827),  like  George  Herbert's  Temple  r 
directed  men's  minds  toward  the  sources  of  poetry  in  the 
beliefs  and  practices  of  the  church. 

In  1833  Newman  took  a  trip  to  Italy,  in  the  course  of 
which  the  vague  feeling  of  his  mission  to  redeem   the 
English  Church  settled  into  a  firm  resolve. 
At  Palermo,   as  he  lay  dangerously  ill  of  a  "*  ** 


fever,  he  kept  exclaiming:  "I  shall  not  die;  I 
have  a  work  to  do."  Sailing  from  Palermo  to  Marseilles 
in  an  orange-boat,  he  was  becalmed  in  the  straits  of  Boni- 
facio, and  here  he  wrote  the  famous  hymn,  ''Lead,  Kindly 
Light."  Upon  his  return  he  began  a  series  of  Tracts 
for  the  Times,  of  which  the  purpose  was  to  define  the 
position  and  beliefs  of  the  English  Church.  From  this 
title  came  the  name  Tractarian,  by  which  his  party  was 
called.  He  expressed  the  inner  meaning  of  the  move- 
ment by  the  sermons  preached  on  Sunday  afternoons  at 
Saint  Mary's,  which  drew  the  young  men  of  Oxford  to- 
become  his  followers  in  this  spiritual  renaissance.  The 
conception  of  the  church  which  Newman  held  gradually 
drew  him  toward  Roman  Catholicism;  the  famous  "Tract 
90,"  in  which  he  tried  to  show  that  membership  in  the 
Church  of  England  was  not  inconsistent  with  many  be- 
liefs and  practices  peculiar-  to  the  Church  of  Rome,  was 
condemned  by  the  University;  Newman  and  his  more 
ardent  followers  withdrew  from  Oxford  to  a  semimonastic 
establishment  at  Littlemore,  whence  in  1845  ne  was  re~ 
ceived  into  the  Church  of  Rome.  This  step,  separating 
Newman  as  it  did  from  many  of  his  friends  and  cowork- 


348  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ers,  is  beautifully  commemorated  in  his  sermon,  "The 
Parting  of  Friends." 

Newman's  conversion  was  a  great  shock  to  the  English 
Church.  Some  of  his  supporters  followed  him  into  the 
Catholic  Church,  the  most  famous  being 
Henry  Edward  Manning  (1808-1892).  Others, 
such  as  James  Antl^ny  Froude,  reacted  vio- 
lently into  the  liberalism  and  scepticism  against  which 
the  Oxford  Movement  had  been  directed.  Newman  was 
himself  bitterly  accused  of  dishonesty  and  treachery. 
To  such  charges,  especially  those  put  forward  by  Charles 
Kingsley,  he  replied  in  his  Apologia  pro  Vita  Sua  (1865), 
in  which  he  gave  an  account  of  his  religious  opinions,  and 
of  the  Oxford  Movement,  so  winning  and  so  exquisite  in 
its  frankness  and  sincerity  that  he  became  from  that  time 
forth  an  object  of  veneration  to  his  countrymen,  almost 
a  national  saint.  Before  this  he  had  been  engaged  in 
founding  a  university  at  Dublin,  from  which  undertaking 
sprang  his  lectures  on  The  Idea  of  a  University.  Aside 
from  this  the  most  notable  of  his  writings  as  a  Catholic 
are  A  Grammar  of  Assent  (1870),  in  which  he  combats 
the  scientific  view  of  belief  as  depending  on  logical  con- 
clusions drawn  from  facts  perceived  by  the  senses;  and 
The  Dream  of  Gerontius,  a  poem  of  death  and  the  rising  of 
the  soul  to  God.  In  1878  he  was  made  cardinal  by  Pope 
Leo  XIII;  twelve  years  later  he  died  at  the  Oratory  of 
Saint  Philip  Neri,  Edgbaston,  which  he  had  established. 

Newman  was  a  writer  in  the  service  of  his  cause,  not 
primarily  an  artist,  yet  he  achieved  very  high  distinction 
in  English  literature.  His  works  embrace 
many  volumes  of -sermons,  theological  trea- 
tises, church  history,  and  two  novels,  as  well 
as  the  essays,  poems,  and  autobiography  already  men- 
tioned. Perhaps  because  of  his  singleness  of  purpose 
Newman's  prose  is  characterized  by  wonderful  transpar- 
ency. He  is  as  clear  in  handling  subjects  of  extreme  diffi- 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA 


349 


culty  as  Macaulay  in  those  which  he  had  reduced  to  ex- 
treme simplicity.  Moreover,  Macaulay 's  idea  reaches- 
us  through  a  resisting  medium;  Newman's  idea  is  one 
with  the  medium;  his  words  convey  his  meaning  as  ether 
conveys  light.  Add  to  this  the  charm  of  Newman's  per- 
sonal, colloquial  tone,  and  the  haunting  melody  of  his 
cadences,  and  we  see  the  source  of  his  mysterious  power, 
by  virtue  of  which  the  Oxford  Movement  is  remembered 
as  one  of  the  touchingly  beautiful  stories  of  human  com- 
panionship and  endeavor,  comparable  to  that  of  Jesus, 
and  his  disciples,  or  Saint  Francis  and  his  order. 

Macaulay  represents  belief  in  the  world  with  its  politi- 
cal and  industrial  progress;  Newman,  a  return  to  faith  in 
a  church  separated  from  the  world,  working  under  divine 
inspiration.  There  were  many  in  these  years  who  could 
not  be  satisfied  with  the  first,  nor  accept  the  second,  wha 
yearned  for  some  spiritual  interpretation  of  the  world 
which  would  save  them  from  acquiescence  in  its  material- 
ism, and  would  give  hope  of  social  reform  deeper  than 
the  improvement  of  governmental  machinery.  To  such 
the  writings  of  Thomas  Carlyle  came  as  a  gospel. 

Carlyle  was  born  in  1795  at  Ecclefechan,  a  village  of 
the  Scotch  lowlands.     After  graduating  from  the  Univer- 
sity of  Edinburgh,  he  rejected  the  ministry,    ^  ^  ^ 
for  which  he  had  been  intended,  and  deter-   .^J  Votings., 
mined  to  be  "a  writer  of  books."     In  these 
early  days   of  privation  and  loneliness,  with  dyspepsia, 
"gnawing  like  a  rat  at  the  pit  of  his  stomach,"  he  fought 
the  battle  which  he  afterward  described  in  Sartor  Resar- 
tus.     The  "  Everlasting  No,"  the  voice  of  unfaith  deny- 
ing God  and  the  worth  of  life,  he  put  from  him;  the. 
"Everlasting  Yea,"  the  assurance  that  life  could  be  made 
divine  through  labor  and  courage,  he  wrote  on  his  banner r 
as  he  went  forth  to  do  battle  against  the  selfishness  and 
spiritual   torpor   of   the   age.     Carlyle's  Life  of  Schiller 
(1823)  and  his  translations  from  the  German  got  him  a 


350  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

hearing  with  the  publishers,  but  his  earnings  remained 
extremely  small.  After  his  marriage  with  Jane  Welsh 
they  went  to  live  at  Craigenputtoch,  a  farmhouse  amid 
miles  of  high,  dreary  moor,  in  a  "solitude  almost  dru- 
idical."  Here  Carlyle  passed  six  years  (1828-1834). 
During  this  time  he  produced  Sartor  Resartus,  the  book 
in  which  he  first  developed  his  characteristic  style  and 
thought,  and  wrote  several  masterly  essays,  notably 
those  on  Burns  and  Boswell's  Johnson.  In  1834  he  came 
to  London,  taking  the  house  in  Cheyne  Row,  Chelsea, 
where  he  spent  the  long  remainder  of  his  life.  In  1837 
he  published  The  French  Revolution,  which  turned  the 
tide  of  public  favor  toward  him.  For  more  than  thirty 
years  after  this  he  stood  as  teacher  and  preacher  to  the 
people  of  England  and  America,  thundering  above  them 
wrath,  warning,  and  exhortation.  The  most  notable 
works  of  this  long  period  were  Chartism  (1839),  an  anti- 
democratic deliverance  on  the  demands  of  the  people  for 
a  " charter,"  or  written  constitution,  involving,  among 
other  concessions,  that  of  universal  suffrage;  Heroes  and 
Hero-Worship  (1841),  a  great  sermon  on  veneration,  ex- 
horting the  world  to  love,  honor,  and  submit  in  childlike 
obedience  to  its  heroic  men,  whether  they  appear  as  war- 
rior, poet,  or  priest;  Past  and  Present  (1843),  an  account  of 
how  one  strong  man  as  abbot  brought  order  out  of  confu- 
sion in  the  monastery  of  Saint  Edmunds,  with  its  lesson 
for  modern  England  eloquently  enforced;  Cromwell  (1845), 
a  study  of  one  of  Carlyle 's  typical  heroes  as  King;  Latter- 
Day  Pamphlets  (1850);  the  Life  of  John  Sterling  (1853),  a 
masterpiece  of  sympathetic  biography;  and  the  History 
of  Friedrich  II  (1858-1865),  a  vast  picture  of  the  life  and 
times  of  the  founder  of  the  Prussian  state.  From  1865 
until  his  death  in  1881  the  respect  in  which  Carlyle's  name 
was  held  steadily  increased,  though  other  teachers  were 
rising  to  take  his  place,  and  some  of  the  dogmas  for  which 
he  stood  were  being  undermined  by  time  and  criticism. 


THE  VICTORIAN  ERA  351 

The  actual  doctrines  which  Carlyle  preached  with  such 
Hebraic  intensity — his  "Gospel  of  Work,"  his  political 
dogma  of  "Government  by  the  Best"  (instead 
of  "government  by  the  worst,"  as  he  held  Underlying 
democracy  to  be) ,  and  all  the  other  shibbo-  work.°f  ms 
leths  of  his  unending  warfare  with  his  age — 
are  of  less  moment  than  the  spirit  which  broadly  underlies 
his  writing.  This  spirit  may  be  denned  as  an  intense 
moral  indignation  against  whatever  is  weak,  or  false,  or 
mechanical;  an  intense  moral  enthusiasm  for  whatever  is 
sincere  and  heroically  forceful.  From  this  point  of  view 
his  two  typical  books  are  Sartor  Resartus  and  Heroes  and 
Hero-Worship.  The  first  is  an  attack  upon  all  those  social 
shams  and  mechanisms  which  defeat  the  sincerity  of  life; 
the  second  is  a  paean  of  praise  for  those  chosen  heroic 
spirits  who  join  earnestness  with  power.  Like  Byron, 
Carlyle  is  in  romantic  revolt  against  convention;  like 
Wordsworth  and  Shelley,  though  in  a  very  different  way 
from  either,  he  seeks  for  some  positive  ideal  upon  which 
to  construct  a  habitable  moral  world  in  place  of  the  un- 
inhabitable one  he  has  striven  to  destroy.  Sartor  Resar- 
tus, which  is  both  destructive  and  constructive,  is  pre- 
eminent in  doctrinal  interest  among  all  his  books.  It  is 
also  extremely  ingenious  in  plan,  and  is  written  with  a 
wonderful  mingling  of  wild  sardonic  humor,  keen  pathos, 
and  an  eloquence  and  imaginative  elevation  almost 
biblical. 

"Sartor  Resartus"  means  "the  tailor  re-tailored,"  and 
its  theme  is  clothes.     It  purports  to  be  the  fragment  of 
a  great   "clothes-philosophy,"   the  life-work 
of  an  eccentric  German  scholar  and  recluse,      R^JJg,,. 
Herr  Diogenes  Teufelsdrock.     This  philoso-      its  Plan, 
phy  has  been  left  in  wild  confusion,  scribbled 
on  scattered  leaves,  and  stuffed  helter-skelter  into  twelve 
bags  signed  with  the  twelve  signs  of  the  Zodiac.     Carlyle 
represents  himself  merely  as  editor  and  commentator  of 


352  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

this  weltering  mass  of  words,  endeavoring  desperately  to 
extract  order  out  of  chaos,  and  to  lighten  a  little,  with 
much  head-shaking  and  consternation,  the  dark  and  mys- 
tic abysses  of  the  German  professor's  thought.  This 
whimsical  fancy  of  Carlyle's  enables  him  to  be  both  author 
and  commentator;  to  state  astounding  paradoxes  and 
then  shrug  his  shoulders  in  sign  of  his  own  irresponsibility; 
to  take  the  side  of  his  opponents  against  what  he,  as  a 
well-regulated  editor,  pretends  to  find  extravagant  and 
crazy  doctrine,  but  what  is  really  his  own  passionate 
heart's  belief,  however  perversely  expressed. 

The  book  has  a  twofold  meaning.  In  the  first  place, 
it  is  a  veiled  sardonic  attack  upon  the  shams  and  pre- 
its  Meanin  tenses  °f  society,  upon  hollow  rank,  hollow 
officialism,  hollow  custom,  out  of  which  life 
and  usefulness  have  departed.  These  are,  Carlyle  hints, 
the  clothes  which  hide  the  real  form  of  society,  garments 
once  useful,  but  grown  by  lapse  of  time  to  be  mere  fan- 
tastic frippery  and  stiff  disfigurement,  stifling  the  breath 
and  health  of  the  social  body.  Under  the  shield  of  this 
novel  idea,  he  attacks  the  mechanical  view  of  life,  me- 
chanical education,  mechanical  government,  mechanical 
religion;  and  he  preaches,  now  with  drollery  and  paradox, 
now  with  fiery  earnestness  and  prophetic  possession,  a 
return  to  sincerity  in  all  things.  In  the  second  place, 
Carlyle  applies  the  clothes-philosophy  mystically  to  the 
universe  at  large;  showing  that  as  clothes  hide  the  real 
man,  and  as  custom  and  convention  hide  real  society, 
so  time  and  space  hide  the  real  spiritual  essence  of  the 
universe.  He  gives  us,  as  the  climax  of  the  book,  a 
transcendental  vision  of  all  created  nature  as  the  gar- 
ment of  God;  the  same  idea  which  Goethe  put  forth  in 
his  description  of  the  earth-spirit  in  Faust: 

I  sit  at  the  roaring  loom  of  Time 
And  weave  the  living  garment  of  God. 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  353 

The  fiction  that  he  was  translating  from  the  German 
gave  Carlyle  an  excuse  for  developing  in  Sartor  Resartus 
a  style  of  expression  entirely  without  exam- 
ple, full  of  un-English  idiom,  of  violent  inver-    <I,tlstyle: 
sions,  startling  pauses,  and  sharp  angularities 
—a  style  which  he  employed  to  rouse  the  attention  of  his 
reader  as  by  a  series  of  electric  shocks.     This  extraordi- 
nary literary  instrument  he  continued  to  use  for  the  re- 
mainder of  his  life.     It  has  been  said  that  henceforth  he 
wrote  English  no  more,  but  "Carlylese."    Whatever  may 
be  thought  of  "Carlylese"  on  purely  artistic  grounds,  it 
is  certain  that  it  was  wonderfully  well  suited  to  his  pur- 
pose of  rousing  a  sluggish  public  out  of  mental  and  moral 
apathy,  into  an  alertness  to  great  issues. 

Sartor  Resartus  proved  Carlyle  to  be,  with  all  discount 
for  the  perversities  of  his  style,  a  great  literary  artist. 
This  title  was  broadened  and  confirmed  by 
his  historical  masterpiece,  The  French  Revo- 
lution.  Here  we  see  to  best  advantage  what 
Emerson  calls  the  " stereoscopic  imagination"  of  Carlyle, 
which  detaches  the  figures  from  the  background,  and  gives 
to  the  individual  portraits  unmatched  vividness.  The  stu- 
pid, patient  King,  the  "lion  Mirabeau,"  the  "sea-green 
incorruptible  Robespierre,"  Marat  the  "large-headed 
dwarfish  individual  of  smoke-bleared  aspect" — not  only 
these  chief  figures,  but  the  minor  ones,  a  multitude  of 
them,  stand  out  in  the  reader's  memory  unforgettably. 
The  larger  pictures  are  equally  admirable;  the  storming 
of  the  Bastille,  the  Feast  of  Pikes,  the  long-drawn  agony 
of  the  Night  of  Spurs.  Above  all,  the  unity  and  sweep  of 
the  story,  reminding  us  of  a  play  of  Shakespeare  or  of 
yEschylus,  only  acted  by  millions  of  figures  on  a  gigantic 
stage,  make  this  the  capital  example  in  English  of  the 
dramatic  portraiture  of  an  historical  era,  and  establish 
beyond  question  Carlyle's,  right  to  be  considered  a  great 
constructive  artist. 


354  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Carlyle  poured  into  the  life  of  his  time  a  stream  of  in- 
tense moral  ardor  and  indignation  which  broke  up  the 

congealed  waters  and  permanently  raised  the 
Cariyie's  standard  of  ethical  feeling.  He  united  in  re- 
His  Age.  markable  degree  the  artistic  and  the  moral 

impulse;  and  he  is  in  this  respect  typical  of 
the  Victorian  era,  during  which,  more  than  ever  before, 
art  has  been  infused  with  moral  purpose.  But  his  nature 
was  too  extravagant,  his  tone  too  bitterly  protesting,  and 
his  method  too  perverse,  to  allow  him  to  become  the  su- 
premely representative  figure  of  the  age.  This  position 
was  reserved  for  Alfred  Tennyson. 

Tennyson  was  born  in  1809,  at  Somersby  Rectory,  Lin- 
colnshire. His  father  was  a  vicar  of  the  Established 

Church,  holding  his  living  by  gift  from  a  large 
Tennyson's  landed  proprietor;  so  that  Tennyson  was  from 

Early  Life  ,.,,.,  A.  ..,     ., 

and  Poetry,  birth  in  close  connection  with  the  mam  con- 
servative interests  of  England,  ecclesiastical 
and  economic.  In  1830,  while  an  undergraduate  at  Cam- 
bridge, he  published  his  first  volume,  a  group  of  little 
verse-studies  in  word-melody  and  word-picture.  Two 
years  later  appeared  a  second  volume,  showing,  in  such 
poems  as  "The  Lady  of  Shalott"  and  "The  Lotus-Eat- 
ers,"  a  control  both  of  mediaeval  and  classical  story,  and 
in  certain  others,  like  "The  Palace  of  Art,"  giving  indi- 
cation of  his  ambition  to  be  not  a  singer  merely,  but  also 
a  teacher.  In  "The  Miller's  Daughter"  and  "The  May 
Queen,"  he  began  his  long  series  of  idylls  of  English  life, 
short  narratives  richly  pictured  and  melodiously  tuned, 
with  which  he  was  destined  to  win  the  public,  all  the 
more  easily  perhaps  because  of  a  touch  of  sentimentality 
and  unreality  in  their  treatment. 

In  1836  Tennyson  went  to  live  near  London,  where  he 
came  into  contact  with  Carlyle,  and  absorbed  much  of 
his  spirit  of  social  protest.  He  also  found  in  the  latter 's 
spiritual  view  of  the  universe  a  support  for  his  religious 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  355 

faith  which  was  to  be  sorely  tried  by  doubt.  For  ten 
years  he  published  nothing,  but  brooded  and  worked 
away  in  his  London  lodgings;  until,  in  1842, 
he  came  forth  with  two  volumes  which  took 
the  critics  and  the  world  by  storm.  In  these 
two  volumes  the  range  and  variety  of  work  was  phe- 
nomenal. Almost  every  province  of  poetry  was  touched 
upon,  from  the  lyric  simplicity  of  ''Break,  break,  break" 
to  the  largely  moulded  epic  narrative  "Morte  d 'Arthur." 
In  one  of  these  poems,  "Locksley  Hall,"  he  uttered  the 
protest  which  young  men  like  himself,  of  good  though 
not  noble  birth,  were  feeling  in  the  presence  of  class  dis- 
tinctions which  subordinated  love  to  rank,  and  of  an  in- 
dustrial civilization  which  made  gold  the  supreme  test 
of  success.  "Locksley  Hall"  is  to  be  contrasted  with 
the  romantic  violence  of  Byron,  and  compared  with  the 
treatment  of  the  same  themes  in  the  novels  of  Thackeray 
and  Charles  Kingsley. 

Five  years  later,  in  1847,  appeared  The  Princess.  It 
was  Tennyson's  contribution  to  the  question,  then  begin- 
ning to  be  widely  discussed,  of  the  higher  edu- 
cation of  women.  The  subtitle  is  "A  Med-  pri^ss." 
ley,"  and  no  description  could  be  more  just. 
The  story  is  fantastically  mixed,  of  elements  brought 
from  many  ages  and  countries,  and  the  style,  always 
ornate  and  richly  jewelled,  runs  through  the  gamut  of 
true  and  false  eloquence,  returning  always  to  the  "mock- 
heroic"  key  in  which  the  whole  poem  is  somewhat  un- 
certainly pitched.  In  The  Princess  we  see  Tennyson's 
eagerness  to  touch  the  vital  public  questions  of  his  time, 
in  odd  conflict  with  his  pure  poetic  interest  in  picture 
and  melody. 

In  his'  next  work,  however,  In  Memoriam  (1850),  the 
poetry  interpenetrates  the  theme,  and  the  theme  itself 
is  one  which  was  just  then  engaging  the  minds  of 
men  more  passionately  than  ever  before  in  the  world's 


356  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

history — the  question  of  the  immortality  of  the  soul. 
The  poem  was  written  in  memory  of  Arthur  Hallam, 
a  beloved  friend  and  college-mate  of  Ten- 
Memoriam"  nvson's>  w^o  had  died  in  1833.  It  consists 
of  a  hundred  and  thirty-one  lyrics,  "short 
swallow- flights  of  song,"  composed  at  intervals  during 
seventeen  years.  In  the  beginning,  the  early  phases  of 
grief  are  touched  upon,  moods  of  stunned  and  bewildered 
sorrow;  gradually  the  personal  pain  merges  itself  into 
anxious  speculation  concerning  the  mystery  of  death  and 
the  hope  of  immortality;  through  states  of  doubt,  despair, 
and  anguished  question,  the  poem  slowly  mounts  into  a 
region  of  firm  though  saddened  faith;  and  it  ends  in  a 
full  hymnal  music  breathing  hope  and  fortitude  of  heart. 
When  In  Memoriam  was  written,  Darwin's  tremendous 
hypothesis  of  the  evolution  of  human  life  from  lower  forms 
had  not  yet  been  given  to  the  world1  but  the  idea  was 
already  in  the  air,  and  in  numberless  ways  science  had 
begun  to  sap  the  old  foundations  of  religious  faith.  Ten- 
nyson courageously  faced  the  facts  of  science,  as  revealed 
in  geology  and  biology;  and  he  succeeded  in  wringing 
religious  consolation  from  the  very  things  which  were 
dreaded  as  a  fatal  menace  to  religion.  In  helping  to 
break  down  the  false  opposition  between,  science  on  the 
one  hand  and  poetry  and  spiritual  faith  on  the  other,  In 
Memoriam  did  a  great  service  to  the  age. 

In  1850  Wordsworth,  who  had  been  poet-laureate  after 
Sou  they,  died;  and  Tennyson  took  the  laurel.  A  govern- 
ment pension  enabled  him  to  marry  and  to 
settle  in  the  Isle  of  Wight.  From  this  time 
until  his  death,  forty-two  years  later,  in  1892, 
he  stood  as  the  spokesman  of  his  people  in  times  of  na- 
tional sorrow  or  rejoicing.  In  such  poems  ais  "The 
Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade,"  "The  Revenge,"  and  the 
"Ode  on  the  Death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,"  he  min- 

1The  Origin  of  Species  appeared  in  1859,  the  Descent  of  Man  in  1871. 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  357 

istered  to  national  pride,  fired  the  national  courage,  and 
brought  poetry  nearer  to  the  national  life  than  it  had 
been  since  Shakespeare.  In  the  Idylls  of  the  King  he 
devoted  fifteen  years  to  painting  the  character  of  the  first 
English  national  hero.  King  Arthur,  and  in  giving  a 
new  meaning  to  the  legends  which  had  grown  up  in  the 
Middle  Ages  about  the  knights  of  the  Round  Table.  In 
no  way  does  he  illustrate  more  conspicuously  his  tendency 
to  forsake  pure  romance  for  romantic  treatment  of  pres- 
ent realities  than  in  these  poems,  which  are  full  of  sug- 
gestions of  modern  moral  and  social  problems.  King 
Arthur's  attempt  to  bring  civilization  to  his  realm  through 
the  devotion  of  his  knights  fails  because  of  sins  which 
Tennyson  felt  to  be  the  peculiar  danger  of  his  own 
age. 

Tennyson's  later  work  consisted  largely  of  the  series 
of  dramas,  for  the  most  part  based  on  English  history — 
Queen  Mary  (1875),  Harold  (1876),  Becket 
(1884).  He  was  not  highly  successful  in 
mastering  the  dramatic  form,  but  his  ex- 
ample recalled  the  former  greatness  and  dignity  of  the 
stage  and  gave  an  early  sign  of  its  recovery.  In  "Locks- 
ley  Hall  Sixty  Years  After"  (1886)  he  replaced  his  earlier, 
rather  boyish  mood  of  protest  by  an  arraignment  of 
society  for  its  sordid  materialism,  its  vice,  cruelty,  and 
inefficiency,  which  reminds  one.of  Carlyle  in  his  bitterest 
mood.  And  then  in  a  number  of  poems  he  recalled  his 
old  manner — in  the  classic  beauty  of  "Demeter"  and 
"The  Death  of  CEnone";  in  the  allegory  of  noble  striving 
toward  the  light  in  "Merlin  and  the  Gleam";  in  the  in- 
stinctive and  spontaneous  trust  of  "Crossing  the  Bar." 
This  poem,  though  not  his  latest,  may  be  taken  as  his 
farewell  word,  spoken  with  solemn  gladness  as  he  put  oft" 
into  the  mysterious  sea  of  death. 

The  Victorian  age  is  unlike  certain  other  great  periods 
of  literature  in  that  it  had  no  one  theme  or  body  of  sub- 


358  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ject-matter  peculiarly  its  own,  such  as  the  mythology  of 
Greece,  or  the  Christian  faith  of  Dante  or  Milton.  On 
the  contrary,  it  drew  material  for  poetry  from  all  ages. 
Tennyson  is  in  this  respect  typical.  Classical,  mediaeval, 
and  Renaissance  themes  in  his  pages  are  mingled  with 
stories  drawn  from  his  own  day,  such  as  "Dora"  and 
"Enoch  Arden."  To  meet  these  various  demands  his 
style  shows  equal  variety.  He  essayed  .every  kind  of 
poetry,  the  song,  the  idyll,  the  dramatic  monologue,  the 
dialect  poem,  the  descriptive  or  " pageant" 
Range  and  poem,  the  ballad,  the  war-ode,  the  threnody, 

Finish  of  '  .  *  '  J' 

His  style.  the  epic  narrative,  and  the  drama.  In  all 
these,  except  the  pure  drama,  he  attained 
high,  and  in  some  the  highest  excellence.  Everywhere 
his  style  is  one  of  exquisite  finish,  with  a  flawlessness  of 
technic  which  it  seems  that  no  labor  could  improve.  He 
did  with  style  everything  that  conscious  mastery  can  do. 
He  emulated  by  turns  the  sweet  felicity  of  Keats,  the 
tender  simplicity  of  Wordsworth,  the  straightforward 
vigor  of  Burns,  the  elusive  melody  and  dreamlike  magic 
of  Coleridge,  the  stormy  sweep  of  Byron,  the  large  majesty 
of  Milton;  and  he  could  blend  them  all  into  a  style  un- 
mistakably Tennysonian,  which  impressed  itself  grandly 
upon  his  age.  His  is  the  best  example  in  English  of  the 
"eclectic"  style,  made  up  of  elements  borrowed  from 
many  sources  and  perfectly  fused  together. 

The  predominating  characteristic  of  Tennyson's  mind 
is  his  sense  of  law.  The  thing  which  most  impresses  him 
is  the  spectacle  of  order  in  the  universe.  The 
highest  praise  which  he  can  give  England  is 
that  she  is  "a  land  of  settled  government," 
where  freedom  is  ever  "broadening  down  from  precedent 
to  precedent."  He  is  impressed  by  science  because  its 
office  is  to  show  law  reigning  everywhere,  subduing  all 
life  to  a  vast  harmonious  scheme.  In  In  Memoriam  a 
majestic  movement  is  given  to  the  poem  by  the  fact  that 


THE  VICTORIAN  ERA  359 

it  follows  the  year  twice  through  its  revolutions,  so  that 
the  succession  of  day  and  night,  the  moon's  changing 
phases,  the  lapsing  of  the  stars  in  their  courses,  the  slow 
pageant  of  the  seasons,  seem  at  last  to  enfold  with  their 
large  harmony  and  peace  the  forlorn  heart  of  the  mourner. 
This  love  of  order  also  causes  Tennyson  to  distrust  indi- 
vidual whim  and  passion.  The  story  of  The  Princess  is 
the  story  of  the  overthrow,  by  a  baby's  touch,  of  all  that 
is  whimsical  and  false  in  the  heroine's  plan  for  the  en- 
franchisement of  her  sex;  and  the  moral  is  that  woman's 
place  in  life  must  be  determined  by  the  natural  law  of 
her  being.  In  the  Idylls  of  the  King  not  only  is  the  pas- 
sion of  Lancelot  and  Guinevere  portrayed  as  the  source 
of  the  moral  ruin  of  Arthur's  kingdom,  but  even  the 
search  for  the  Holy  Grail  is  represented  as  contributing 
to  this  ruin,  because  it  draws  off  Arthur's  knights  from 
their  true  work  of  establishing  order  and  justice,  and 
causes  them  to  lose  themselves  in  the  extravagances  of 
mystical  passion.  Tennyson  is  in  constant  protest,  open 
or  covert,  against  the  individualism  which  the  Victorian 
era  inherited  from  the  romantic  revival.  Yet  he  is  nev- 
ertheless the  supremely  representative  figure  of  that  era, 
because  he  included  and  reconciled  a  greater  number  of 
its  diverse  interests  than  any  other  single  writer. 

Robert  Browning,   who  disputes  with   Tennyson   the 
first  place  among  Victorian  poets,  is  Tennyson's  opposite 
in  almost  every  respect  but  fame  and  length      Tennyson 
of  years.     His  genius  was  pre-eminently  dra-      and 
matic;  his  interest  lay,  not  in  universal  law,      contSd, 
but  in  individual  passion.     And  his  style,  in- 
stead of  being  eclectic  and  carefully  elaborated,  was  indi- 
vidual to  the  point  of  lawlessness,  and  often  careless  of 
form   in   the  pursuit   of  meaning.     Browning  is   strong 
where  Tennyson  is  weak,  weak  where  Tennyson  is  strong. 
Both  shared  almost  equally  in  the  Victorian  tendency 
toward  reflection,  and  toward  a  didactic  aim;  but  their 


360  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

reflection  was  exercised  upon  very  different  phenomena, 
and  their  teaching  was  widely  opposed. 

Browning  was  born  in  London  in  1812.  Mingled  with 
the  English  and  Scotch  blood  in  his  veins  was  a  more  dis- 
tant strain  of  German  and  Creole,  a  fact  of 
value  in  considering  the  wide  cosmopolitan 
Poetic  sympathy  of  his  imagination.  He  passed  his 

boyhood  and  youth  in  the  suburb  of  Camber- 
well,  near  enough  to  London  to  make  the  great  smoky 
city  on  the  horizon  a  constant  reminder  of  the  complex 
human  life  he  was  to  interpret  more  subtly  and  deeply 
than  any  poet  had  done  since  the  Elizabethan  age.  His 
first  stimulus  to  poetic  creation  was  given  by  a  volume 
of  Shelley  which  he  picked  up  by  chance  on  a  London 
book-stall  in  his  fourteenth  year.  His  first  long  poem, 
Pauline,  published  in  1833,  is  a  half -dramatic  study  of 
the  type  of  spiritual  life  which  Shelley's  own  career  em- 
bodied; and  Shelley's  influence  is  clearly  traceable  both 
in  its  thought  and  in  its  style.  After  a  trip  to  Russia 
and  Italy,  Browning  published  Paracelsus,  in  his  twenty- 
fourth  year.  This,  like  Pauline,  is  the  "history  of  a 
soul."  In  it  Browning's  wonderful  endowments  are  al- 
ready manifest.  His  knowledge  of,  the  causes  of  spiritual 
growth  and  decay,  his  subtle  analysis  of  motive  and 
counter-motive,  his  eloquence  in  pleading  a  cause,  the 
enkindled  power  and  beauty  of  his  language  when  blown 
upon  by  noble  passion — all  appear  in  full  process  of  de- 
velopment. The  hindrances  from  which  he  suffered  are 
also  only  too  clear,  especially  his  tendency  to  lose  him- 
self in  tangled  thought  and  to  grow  harsh  and  obscure 
in  pursuing  the  secondary  suggestions  of  his  theme.  In 
Sordello  (1840)  these  faults  smother  down  the  clear  fire 
of  poetry  into  a  torpid  smoke.  In  Pippa  Passes,  how- 
ever (1841),  he  shook  himself  free  from  these  faults  of 
manner,  and  produced  a  poem  of  sustained  beauty,  as 
clear  as  sunlight,  a  work  of  simple,  melodious,  impassioned 


THE  VICTORIAN  ERA  361 

art.  Between  1840  and  1845  Browning  was  chiefly  occu- 
pied with  attempts  in  the  acting  drama,  of  which  the 
most  interesting  are  perhaps  In  a  Balcony,  Colombe's 
Birthday,  A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon,  and  The  Return  of  the 
Druses.  He  had  also  begun  those  short  poems  dealing 
with  special  moments  in  the  lives  of  various  men  and 
women,  historical  or  imaginary,  which  constitute  the 
most  important  division  of  his  work.  These  are  now  in- 
cluded under  such  collective  titles  as  Dramatic  Lyrics, 
Dramatic  Romances,  and  Men  and  Women. 

In  1846  Browning  married  Elizabeth  Barrett,  whose  po- 
etic reputation  was  then  far  greater  than  his,  and  went 
to  live  in  Italy.  The  pair  settled  at  Florence,  in  the 
house  called  Casa  Guidi,  from  which  was  taken  the  title 
of  Mrs.  Browning's  poem  on  the  Italian  Liberation,  Casa 
Guidi  Windows.  Here  Browning  continued  his  great 
series  of  dramatic  monologues.  Here,  also,  after  Mrs. 
Browning's  death  in  1861,  he  began  The  Ring  and  the 
Book.  This  is  the  crowning  effort  of  his  genius  for  the 
vastness  of  its  scope  and  its  grasp  of  human  nature; 
though  it  lacks  the  spontaneous  grace  and  charm  which 
the  best  of  his  shorter  pieces  share  with  Pip  pa  Passes, 
that  perfect  fruit  of  his  youthful  imagination.  After  the 
death  of  his  wife,  Browning  spent  most  of  his  time  in 
England.  He  wrote  much,  with  a  steady  gain  in  intel- 
lectual subtlety,  but  with  a  corresponding  loss  of  poetic 
beauty.  He  made  a  more  and  more  deliberate  sacrifice 
of  form  to  matter,  wrenching  and  straining  the  verse- 
fabric  in  order  to  pack  into  it  all  the  secondary  meanings 
of  the  theme.  To  the  last,  however,  his  genius  continued 
to  throw  out  bursts  and  jets  of  exquisite  music,  color, 
and  feeling.  Such,  for  instance,  are  the  little  pieces  called 
"Wanting  is— What?"  and  "Never  the  Time  and  the 
Place,"  written  in  his  seventy-first  year;  and  such  is 
"Summum  Bonum,"  written  just  before  the  pen  dropped 
from  his  hand  in  1889,  in  the  seventy-seventh  year  of  his 


362  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

age.  He  had  had  to  wait  long  for  recognition,  but  during 
the  latter  years  of  his  life  his  fame  overshadowed  even 
that  of  Tennyson,  and  his  works  were  studied  and  made 
a  cult  of,  with  an  enthusiasm  seldom  accorded  to  a  living 
poet. 

Browning's  earliest  poem,  Pauline,  was,  he  tells  us, 
intended  as  the  first  of  a  series  of  "mono-dramatic  epics," 
each  of  which  was  to  present  the  "history 
of  a  soul."  Broadly  viewed,  the  whole  of 
Moments  "  of  Browning's  work  is  what  his  youthful  ambi- 

Soul  History:       .  ,      -         .  .        .^        T J   .,  £ 

illustrated  by  tion  dreamed  of  making  it.  In  three  forms — 
"  Pippa^  pure  drama,  dramatic  narrative,  and  dramatic 
lyric — he  gave  the  history  of  hundreds  of 
souls;  or  if  not  their  whole  history,  at  least  some  crucial 
moment  of  it,  when  its  issues  trembled  in  the  balance 
and  dipped  toward  good  or  evil.  In  his  earlier  life  he 
made  many  attempts  to  present  these  crucial  moments 
in  regular  drama  intended  for  the  stage,  but  the  form 
was  not  perfectly  suited  to  his  peculiar  task.  In  Pippa 
Passes,  however,  while  keeping  the  dramatic  form,  he 
threw  aside  the  demands  of  stage  presentation,  and  pre- 
sented four  special  moments  of  soul-history,  connected 
with  each  other  only  by  a  slight  thread.  The  germ  of 
the  poem  came  to  him  in  youth,  while  listening  to  a 
gypsy  girl  singing  in  the  Camberwell  woods.  He  im- 
agined some  one  walking  alone  through  life,  apparently 
too  obscure  to  leave  any  trace  behind,  but  unconsciously 
exercising  a  lasting  influence  at  every  step.  This  abstract 
conception  he  afterward  connected  with  the  personality 
of  a  little  silk-winder  in  the  silk-mills  of  Asolo,  a  mountain 
town  which  he  had  visited  on  his  first  journey  to  Italy. 
Pippa  walks  through  Asolo  on  New  Year's  Day,  her  one 
holiday  in  the  year,  unconsciously  dropping  her  divine 
songs  into  the  lives  of  four  groups  of  people,  just  at  the 
moment  when  their  fates  are  trembling  between  good 
and  evil,  courage  and  cowardice;  and  by  the  touching 


THE    VICTORIAN   ERA  363 

purity  and  gladness  of  her  voice,  or  by  the  significant 
words  she  utters,  she  saves  each  in  turn.  At  evening  she 
goes  back  to  her  bare  room  and  sinks  to  sleep  with  a  final 
song  on  her  lips,  still  ignorant  of  the  service  she  has  done 
to  "Asolo's  happiest  four." 

Pippa  Passes  illustrates  the  essential  qualities  of 
Browning's  dramatic  genius.  He  cannot  throw,  as  could 
Shakespeare  and  his  fellows,  large  and  varied 

r   ,  .,  Strength  and 

groups  of  people  together,  and  make  them  weakness  of 
act  and  interact  with  the  ceaseless  play  and  His  Pramatic 
evolution  of  life.  Nor  has  he  the  greater 
Shakespearian  gift — the  supreme  dramatic  gift — of  for- 
getting and  obscuring  himself.  In  all  the  words  which 
his  characters  utter  we  seem  to  hear  the  ring  of  Brown- 
ing's own  voice;  as  an  accompaniment  to  their  actions 
there  always  runs,  silent  or  expressed,  his  comment  of 
blame  or  praise.  He  is  less  a  dramatist  than  an  exhibitor 
and  interpreter  of  single  dramatic  situations,  such  as  the 
four  which  are  bound  loosely  together  by  Pippa's  chance- 
heard  songs.  But  in  presenting  these  single  situations 
Browning's  power  is  absolute;  here  he  works  with  the 
most  graphic  vividness,  and  with  a  compression  of  mean- 
ing which  crowds  into  a  few  lines  the  implications  of  a 
lifetime. 

It  follows  from  the  peculiar  nature  of  Browning's  dra- 
matic gift  that  his  most  vital  work  is  in  his  short  poems, 
where  he  handles  single  situations  or  soul- 
states,  isolated  from  what  has  gone  before 
and  from  what  is  to  come  after.     In  these  he   Peculiarities 
not  only  selects  by  preference  a  highly  special    Method, 
moment  in  the  life   of  the  man  or  woman 
whose  soul  he  wishes  to  show  us  in  its  working,  but  as  a 
rule  he  views  his  theme  from  some  odd  and  striking  point 
of  view.     Another  peculiarity  of  Browning's  method  in 
his  short  poems  is  that  he  throws  the  reader  into  the 
midst  of  the  theme  with  startling  suddenness,  and  then 


364  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

proceeds  to  flash  facet  after  facet  of  the  subject  on  him, 
with  a  rapidity  which  is  apt  to  bewilder  a  reader  not  in 
the  secret  of  the  method.  There  are  no  explanations, 
no  gradual  transitions;  we  are  not  allowed  to  guess  at 
the  whole  intention  until  the  end  is  reached.  A  cap- 
ital example  of  this  peculiarity  is  the  "  Soliloquy  of  the 
Spanish  Cloister,"  which  has  to  be  read  to  the  end 
before  we  see  it  for  what  it  is,  the  self-revealed  picture 
of  a  narrow-minded,  superstitious,  sensual  monk,  stirred 
to  hatred  by  a  brother  monk,  whose  mild,  benignant 
ways  and  genuine  piety  we  gradually  discern  through 
the  speaker's  jeers  and  curses.  If  we  add  to  these 
peculiarities  of  method  the  fact  that  Browning's  best 
work  is  very  compressed  in  style,  we  see  why  many 
persons  have  found  obscure  in  him  what  is  in  reality  clear 
enough,  but  is  not  to  be  perceived  clearly  without  atten- 
tion and  alertness  on  the  reader's  part.  Perhaps  the 
poem  which  best  illustrates  all  Browning's  peculiarities 
of  method,  harmoniously  combined,  is  "My  Last  Duch- 
ess," a  marvellous  example  of  his  power  to  give  a  whole 
life  history,  with  a  wealth  of  picturesque  detail,  in  a  few 
lines  intensely  compressed  and  heavily  weighted  with 
suggestion. 

The  range  of  Browning's  dramatic  sympathy  is  very 
great.  In  "Caliban  upon  Setebos"  he  has  shown  the 
grotesque  imaginings  of  a  half-human  mon- 
JJlJiSJ?  ster>  groPing  after  an  explanation  of  the  uni- 
Sympathy.  verse.  In  " Childe  Roland"  he  has  shown 
the  mystical  heart  of  mediaeval  knighthood, 
fronting  spectral  terrors  in  its  search  after  the  stronghold 
of  sin,  the  Dark  Tower,  where  lurks  the  enemy  of  life 
and  joy.  In  "Abt  Vogler"  and  "A  Toccata  of  Ga- 
luppi's"  he  has  touched  upon  the  inner  meanings  of 
music,  and  has  painted  for  us  permanent  types  of  the 
musical  enthusiast.  In  "The  Grammarian's  Funeral" 
he  has  shown  the  poetry  and  heroism  hidden  underneath 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  365 

the  gray  exterior  of  the  life  of  a  Renaissance  pedant.  In 
"Fra  Lippo  Lippi,"  "Andrea  del  Sarto,"  and  "Pictor 
Ignotus"  he  has  given  the  psychology  of  the  painter's 
nature,  and  has  flashed  illumination  upon  the  sources  of 
success  and  failure  in  art  which  lie  deep  in  the  moral 
being  of  the  artist.  In  "Balaustion's  Adventure"  he  has 
revealed  the  inner  spirit  of  Greek  life  in  the  fifth  cen- 
tury before  Christ.  In  "A  Death  in  the  Desert"  he  has 
led  us  into  the  mystical  rapture  of  the  early  Christians; 
and  in  "Christmas  Eve"  and  "Easter  Day"  he  has  ap- 
proached Christian  faith  from  the  modern  position.  In 
"Saul"  he  has  shown  us,  against  the  splendid  background 
of  patriarchal  Israel,  the  boy  David  singing,  in  the  tent 
of  the  great  King,  songs  of  human  joy  which  rise,  in  a 
sudden  opening  of  the  heavens  of  prophecy,  into  a  song 
of  the  coming  of  the  Messiah.  Nowhere  out  of  Shake- 
speare can  be  found  a  mind  more  wide-ranging  over  the 
outer  circumstances  and  the  inner  significance  of  man's 
life,  or  a  more  unwearied  inquiry  into  its  spiritual  crises. 
Browning's  poetry  is  intensely  charged  with  moral  pur- 
pose. The  world  is  for  him,  in  Keats 's  phrase,  the  "Val- 
ley of  Soul-making";  and  every  act,  thought, 
and  feeling  of  life  is  of  concern  only  as  it  Teaching. 
hinders  or  determines  the  soul  on  its  course. 
But  he  believes  salvation  to  lie,  not,  as  does  Tennyson, 
in  the  suppression  of  individual  will  and  passion,  but  in 
their  strenuous  exercise.  It  is  the  moments  of  high  ex- 
citement in  human  life  which  interest  him,  because  in 
such  moments  the  great  saving  assertions  of  will  and  pas- 
sion are  made.  Hence  his  interest  in  art,  which  embodies 
these  moments  of  high  excitement ;  and  hence  his  indiffer- 
ence to  science,  which  deals  with  impersonal  law.  Love, 
as  the  supreme  experience  and  function  of  the  soul,  test- 
ing its  temper  and  revealing  its  probable  fate,  holds  the 
first  place  in  his  thought.  In  such  poems  as  "Cristina," 
"Evelyn  Hope,"  "The  Last  Ride  Together,"  "My  Star," 


366  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

"By  the  Fireside,"  and  a  multitude  more,  he  has  pre- 
sented love  in  its  varied  phases  and  has  celebrated  its 
manifold  meanings  not  only  on  earth  but  in  the  infinite 
range  of  worlds  through  which  he  believes  that  the  soul 
is  destined  to  go  in  search  after  its  own  perfection.  By 
the  intensity  and  positiveness  of  his  doctrine  he  has  influ- 
enced his  age  profoundly,  and  has  made  his  name  synony- 
mous with  faithfulness  to  the  human  love  which  life 
brings,  and  through  that  to  the  divine  love  which  it  im- 
plies and  promises. 

The  robustness  of  Browning's  nature,  its  courage,  its 
abounding  joy  and  faith  in  life,  make  his  works  a  perma- 
nent storehouse  of  spiritual  energy  for  the  race,  a  store- 
house to  which  for  a  long  time  to  come  it  will  in  certain 
moods  always  return.  In  an  age  distracted  by  doubt 
and  divided  in  will,  his  strong,  unfaltering  voice  has  been 
lifted  above  the  perplexities  and  hesitations  of  men  like 
a  bugle-call  to  joyous  battle  in  which  the  victory  is  to 
the  brave. 

One  of  Browning's  most  perfect  short  poems,  "One 
Word  More,"  is  addressed  to  his  wife,  Elizabeth  Barrett 

Browning  (i8o61-i86i),  and  is  a  kind  of 
Browning,  counter-tribute  to  her  most  perfect  work,  the 

Sonnets  from  the  Portuguese,  which  contain 
the  record  of  her  courtship  and  marriage.  Her  early  life 
was  shadowed  by  illness  and  affliction;  and  her  early 
poetry  (The  Seraphim,  1838,  Poems,  1844)  shows  in  many 
places  the  defects  of  unreality  and  of  overwrought  emo- 
tion natural  to  work  produced  in  the  loneliness  of  a  sick- 
chamber.  The  best  known  of  these  early  poems  are  per- 
haps "Lady  Geraldine's  Courtship,"  where  she  works 
under  the  influence  of  Tennyson's  idylls,  and  "The  Cry 
of  the  Children,"  where  she  voices  the  humanitarian  pro- 
test against  the  practice  of  employing  child-labor  in  mines 

Mrs.  Browning's  birth  is  usually  given  as  1809.     We  have,  however, 
Browning  s  own  positive  statement  as  to  the  correctness  of  the  earlier  date. 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA.  367 

and  factories.  After  her  marriage  and  removal  to  Italy 
her  health  improved,  and  her  art  greatly  strengthened. 
The  Sonnets  from  the  Portuguese  (1850)  are  among  the 
noblest  love-poems  in  the  language,  taking  rank  with 
Shakespeare's  Sonnets  and  Rossetti's  House  of  Life  as  one 
of  the  three  great  English  sonnet-cycles.  Mrs.  Browning 
was  deeply  interested  in  the  struggle  of  Italy  to  shake  off 
her  bondage  to  Austria,  as  is  shown  by  her  Casa  Guidi 
Windows,  published  in  1851.  In  1856  appeared  her  most 
ambitious  work,  Aurora  Leigh,  a  kind  of  versified  novel 
of  modern  English  life,  with  a  social  reformer  and  hu- 
manitarian* of  aristocratic  lineage,  for  hero,  and  a  young 
poetess,  in  large  part  a  reflection  of  Mrs.  Browning's  own 
personality,  for  heroine.  Aurora  Leigh  shows  the  influ- 
ence of  a  great  novel- writing  age,  when  the  novel  was 
becoming  more  and  more  imbued  with  social  purpose.  It 
attempts  to  perform  in  verse  the  same  social  function 
which  Dickens,  George  Eliot,  Kingsley,  and  others,  strove 
to  perform  in  prose.  The  interest  in  public  questions 
also  appears  in  Mrs.  Browning's  Poems  before  Congress 
(1860),  and  in  her  Last  Poems  (1862). 

Mrs.  Browning's  technic  is  uncertain,  and  she  never 
freed  herself  from  her  characteristic  faults  of  vagueness 
and  unrestraint.  But  her  sympathy  with  noble  causes, 
the  elevation  and  ardor  of  her  moods  of  personal  emo- 
tion, and  the  distinction  of  her  utterance  at  its  best,  out- 
balance these  negative  considerations.  She  shares  her 
husband's  strenuousness  and  optimism,  but  she  speaks  al- 
ways from  the  feminine  vantage-ground.  Her  character- 
istic note  is  that  of  intimate,  personal  feeling;  even  Casa 
Guidi  Windows  has  been  aptly  called  "a  woman's  love- 
making  with  a  nation." 

Browning's  robust  optimism  in  the  face  of  all  the  un- 
settling and  disturbing  forces  .of  the  age  is  thrown  out  in 
sharp  relief,  when  we  contrast  him  with  a  somewhat 
younger  poet,  Matthew  Arnold,  in  whom  the  prevailing 


368  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tone  is  one  of  doubt  and  half-despairing  stoicism.  Arnold 
was  born  in  1822,  the  son  of  Doctor  Thomas  Arnold, 
the  famous  head-master  of  Rugby.  He  went 

UP  to  Oxford  Just  at  ^  time  when  t*16 
religious  revival,  under  John  Keble  and 
John  Henry  Newman,  was  stirring  the  university  to 
its  depths.  The  unsettling  effect  of  this  agitation,  com- 
ing after  the  very  different  religious  teaching  of  Rugby, 
had  much  to  do  with  determining  Arnold's  character- 
istic attitude  of  mind  toward  questions  of  faith.  From 
his  thirtieth  year  until  shortly  before  his  death  in  1888, 
he  held  the  position  of  inspector  of  schools.  To  the 
demands  and  responsibilities  of  this  official  position  were 
added,  in  1857,  those  of  a  professorship  of  poetry  at 
Oxford.  These  outer  circumstances  were  largely  instru- 
mental in  turning  his  energies  away  from  poetry,  into 
the  field  of  prose  criticism,  where,  for  the  last  twenty 
years  of  his  life,  he  held  the  position  of  a  leader,  almost 
of  a  dictator. 

Arnold  may  be  described  as  a  poet  of  transition.  His 
bent  as  a  poet  was  taken  chiefly  between  1840  and  1850, 
the  period  intervening  between  the  first  and 
^e  second  outburst  of  creative  energy  in 
Transition.  the  century.  Carlyle,  Browning,  Tennyson, 
and  Newman  were,  each  in  his  way,  already 
building  anew  the  structures  of  spiritual  faith  and  hope; 
but  to  Arnold,  as  to  many  others,  the  ebbing  of  the  old 
wave  was  far  more  clearly  felt  than  the  rising  of  the  new 
one.  Standing,  as  he  says, 

between  two  worlds,  one  dead, 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born, 

he  fronts  life  wearily,  or  at  best  stoically.  He  seeks  con- 
solation in  the  inteUect;  and  his  poetry,  though  penetrated 
with  romantic  sensibility,  has  always  the  intellectual  self- 
consciousness  which  betrays  the  classical  bias. 


THE    VICTORIAN   ERA  369 

On  the  side  of  religion,  Arnold's  character  led  him  to 
a  melancholy  return  upon  the  old  faiths,  and  to  a  stoical 
rejection  of  them  as  outworn  things,  "a  dead 
time's  exploded  dream."  He  has  expressed 
this  at  least  twice  very  impressively,  in 
"Dover  Beach"  and  "Obermann."  It  is  this  same  scep- 
ticism applied  to  the  facts  of  human  intercourse  which 
breathes  sadly  but  calmly  through  the  series  of  love  lyrics 
entitled  "Switzerland."  Just  as  he  has  felt  compelled  to 
surrender  his  faith  in  a  personal  God  and  a  compassion- 
ate Saviour,  so,  as  he  regards  the  human  heart  and  its 
destiny,  he  loses  faith  in  the  heart's  promises  as  well.  He 
sees  the  sad  instability  of  mortal  affection  rather  than 
its  heroic  constancy;  he  is  pierced  by  a  sense  of  the  in- 
evitable loneliness  of  each  human  soul.  The  imperfec- 
tions and  unrealized  ideals  of  life,  in  which  Tennyson 
found  cause  to  "faintly  trust  the  larger  hope,"  and  in 
which  Browning  saw  the  "broken  arcs"  of  heaven's  "per- 
fect round,"  Arnold  made  a  reason  for  doubt,  declaring 
that  men  should  put  away  delusion  and  expect  in  the 
future  only  what  they  see  in  the  past.  Other  phases  of 
this  stoic  dejection,  and  of  the  struggle  which  it  wages 
with  the  restless  craving  for  joy,  are  to  be  studied  in  the 
pieces  caUed  "Self-Dependence"  and  "A  Summer  Night." 

For  his  ideal  of  form,  Arnold  went  resolutely  to  the 
literature  of  Greece,   abjuring  romantic  wilfulness  and 
vagueness  in  favor  of  classic  lucidity  and  re- 
straint.    When  he  works  more  deliberately     Form, 
in  the  Greek  spirit  and  manner,  his  style  is 
often  cold  and  dry.     In  his  long  poems,  especially,  he  is 
apt  to  sacrifice  too  much  to  his  reverence  for  classical 
tradition.     Only  one  of  them,   "Sohrab  and  Rustum," 
combines  classic  purity  of  style  with  romantic  ardor  of 
feeling.     The  truth  of  its  oriental  color,  the  deep  pathos 
of  the  situation,  the  fire  and  intensity  of  the  action,  the 
strong   conception   of   character,   and    the   full,    solemn 


370  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

music  of  the  verse,  make  "Sohrab  and  Rustum"  unques- 
tionably the  masterpiece  among  Arnold's  longer  poems. 
The  same  unity  of  classic  form  with  romantic  feeling 
characterizes  his  two  shorter  masterpieces,  "The  Scholar 
Gypsy"  and  "Thyrsis,"  which  are  crystal-clear  without 
coldness,  and  restrained  without  loss  of  a  full  volume  of 
power. 

Arnold  was  not  able,  in  his  poetry,  to  live  through  the 
period  of  dejection  and  doubt,  and  to  follow  to  their 
mature  issues  such  hints  of  hope  and  faith 
His  Desertion  ^  jjjg  poems  show.  Not  even  in  "Thyrsis," 
Prose?  **  the  beautiful  threnody  in  which  he  celebrated 
his  dead  friend  Clough,  has  he  found  it  pos- 
sible to  embrace  any  but  the  most  shadowy  consolation1. 
In  "Obermann  Once  More"  he  does,  indeed,  for  a  mo- 
ment emerge  into  something  like  optimism;  but  when 
that  piece  was  written  his  work  as  a  poet  was  done.  He 
seems  to  have  felt  that  the  practical  work  to  which  he 
was  called  of  regenerating  society  and  reforming  public 
faith  could  be  better  done  in  prose.  He  became  a  critic 
of  poetry,  of  society,  and  of  religion. 

Arnold  saw  more  clearly  than  Carlyle  or  Tennyson  the 
situation  of  the  modern  world  in  the  face  of  the  immense 

Arnold's  ^^   °f  ^^  knowledge— the  result  of  Scieri- 

p£J°e>  s  tine  discovery— and  the  vast  increase  of 
"people  who  counted" — the  result  of  democ- 
racy. The  first  threatened  to  sweep  away  old  bases  of 
belief  and  morality;  the  second  threatened  to  overwhelm 
civilization  and  social  control,  which  had  hitherto  been 
the  function  of  the  upper  class.  Arnold's  own  profes- 
sion, that  of  inspector  of  schools  in  the  national  system 
of  education,  brought  him  into  practical  contact  with  the 
situation.  So,  from  1860  on,  he  devoted  himself  chiefly 
to  the  writing  of  essays,  in  a  style  more  urbane  than  Car- 
lyle's  but  equally  fuU  of  purpose.  He  dealt  with  society 
itself  in  the  papers  composing  Culture  and  Anarchy 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  371 

(1869);  with  the  effect  of  scientific  criticism  on  man's  at- 
titude toward  the  Bible  and  Christian  faith,  in  Literature 
and  Dogma  (1873);  and  with  the  values  of  literature  of 
the  past  to  modern  life  in  Essays  in  Criticism.  (First 
Series  1865,  Second  Series  1888.) 

Arnold's  social  message  was  more  definite  than  Car- 
lyle's  gospel -of  work  and  hero-worship,  though  perhaps 
no  easier  for  the  mass  of  men  to  follow.  It 
is  expressed  in  his  often-used  term  "culture,"  Jidea*"*"1 
which  he  defines  as  "a  pursuit  of  our  total 
perfection  by  means  of  getting  to  know,  on  matters  which 
most  concern  us,  the  best  which  has  been  thought  and 
said  in  the  world."  It  is  easy  to  see  that  this  idea  of 
total  perfection  in  life  is  in  harmony  with  Arnold's  classi- 
cal ideal  in  poetry,  an  ideal  of  symmetry,  of  subordina- 
tion of  parts  to  whole.  Carlyle  had  preached  the  value 
of  conduct,  the  ''Hebraic"  element  in  life;  Arnold  set 
himself  to  preach  the  value  of  the  complementary  "Hel- 
lenic" element — open-mindedness,  delight  in  ideas,  alert- 
ness to  entertain  new  points  of  view,  and  willingness  to 
examine  life  constantly  in  the  light  of  new  postulates. 
Wherever  in  religion,  politics,  education,  or  literature 
he  saw  his  countrymen  under  the 'domination  of  narrow 
ideals,  he  came  speaking  the  mystic  word  of  deliverance, 
"culture."  It  is  by  culture  that  the  Puritan  dissenter 
shall  be  made  to  see  the  lack  of  elevation  and  beauty  in 
his  church  forms}  that  the  radical  politician  shall  reach 
a  saving  sense  of  the  rawness  and  vulgarity  of  his  pro- 
gramme of  state;  that  the  man  whose  literary  taste  is 
bad  shall  be  admitted  into  the  true  kingdom  of  letters. 
In  almost  all  of  his  prose  writing  he  attacks  some  form 
of  "Philistinism,"  by  which  word  he  characterized  the 
narrow-mindedness  and  self-satisfaction  of  the  British 
middle  class. 

Just  as  Arnold  was  concerned  with  the  problem  of 
assimilating  the  masses  into  the  civilization  of  the  future, 


372  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

so  also  was  he  engaged  in  the  task  of  assimilating  new 
knowledge  into  the  intellectual  and  moral  life  of  mankind. 
The  place  of  science  in  the  education  of  the 
Stus  and  future  he  considered  in  ''Literature  and  Sci- 
Literary  ence"  (in  Discourses  in  America).  He  wrote 

Criticism.  severai  books  to  show  how  the  scientific  criti- 
cism of  the  Bible  left  untouched  the  essentials  of  Christi- 
anity—the conception  of  God  as  a  power  "not  ourselves 
which  makes  for  righteousness,"  of  the  Hebrews;  "the 
secret  of  Jesus,"  that  "  the  kingdom  of  heaven  lies  within 
you."  But  perhaps  his  heart  was  most  entirely  in  his 
essays  in  literary  criticism.  As  professor  of  poetry  at 
Oxford  (1857-1867)  his  lectures  dealt  with  important 
themes,  such  as  "Celtic  Literature"  and  "Translating 
Homer."  He  pointed  out  the  value  and  methods  of  the 
study  of  poetry,  and  the  peculiar  contribution  of  poets 
like  Wordsworth,  Byron,  and  Keats  to  man's  sense  for 
beauty,  which,  with  the  sense  for  conduct  and  the  sense 
for  knowledge,  makes  up  the  sense  for  total  perfection. 
Arnold  is  a  more  authoritative  critic  than  any  other  of 
his  day.  He  inherited  classical  standards  and  aesthetic 
methods  of  judgment,  but  on  the  whole  he  felt  the  func- 
tion of  criticism  to  be  largely  one  of  selection  and  inter- 
pretation. He  defined  it  as  "a  disinterested  endeavor  to 
learn  and  propagate  the  best  that  is  known  and  thought 
in  the  world,"  and  thus  emphasized  its  importance  in  the 
attainment  of  culture,  both  personal  and  social. 

The  total  impression  which  Arnold  makes  in  his  prose 
may  be  described  as  that  of  a  spiritual  man-of-the-world. 
His "  Post-  *n  comPar^sori  with  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  and 
Romantic"  Newman,  he  is  worldly.  For  the  romantic 
v?w°f  passion  and  mystic  vision  of  these  men  he 
substitutes  an  ideal  of  balanced  cultivation, 
the  ideal  of  the  trained,  sympathetic,  cosmopolitan  gen- 
tleman. He  marks  a  return  to  the  conventions  of-  life 
after  the  storm  and  stress  of  the  romantic  age.  Yet  in 


THE   VICTORIAN  EEA  373 

his  own  way  he  also  was  a  prophet  and  a  preacher,  striv- 
ing whole-heartedly  to  release  his  countrymen  from  bond- 
age to  mean  things,  and  pointing  their  gaze  to  that  sym- 
metry and  balance  of  character  which  has  seemed  to 
many  noble  minds  the  true  goal  of  human  endeavor. 

The  name  of  Arthur  Hugh  Clough  (1819-1861)  will 
always  be  associated  with  that  of  Matthew  Arnold  by 
reason  of  the  threnody,  Thyrsis.  Clough  was 
at  Rugby  with  Arnold,  and  at  Oxford,  during 
the  years  of  Newman's  influence,  and  his  seri- 
ous nature  was  stirred  to  its  depths  by  the  movement. 
He  was,  however,  of  too  sceptical  a  nature  to  yield  to 
authority  in  religion,  and  as  the  result  of  his  intellectual 
honesty  he  resigned  his  fellowship,  and  after  an  attempt 
to  settle  in  America,  he  became  an  examiner  in  the  Edu- 
cation Office.  He  died  in  1861. 

Clough's  case  is  typical  of  that  of  young  men  of  the 
day  whose  sense  of  the  actual  world  and  of  the  new  scien- 
tific standards  of  truth  made  romanticism  in  life  or  in 
religion  impossible  for  them.  Like  many  of  his  contem- 
poraries he  was  much  influenced  by  Carlyle.  He  was  a 
genuine  poet,  but  the  spiritual  conflict  in  which  he  lived 
prevented  him  from  undertaking  any  large  production. 
His  longest  poem  is  The  Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich  (1848), 
the  love-story,  in  hexameter  verse,  of  an  Oxford  scholar 
and  a  girl  in  a  Highland  village  or  bothie,  who  is  lovely 
to  him  as  she  appears  doing  the  hard  necessary  field  work 
of  the  farm.  Through  her  he  feels  the  attraction  of 
reality,  and  abandoning  his  conventional  academic  career, 
he  emigrates  to  New  Zealand.  Clough's  most  notable 
poems  are  lyrics  which  express,  sometimes,  almost  scorn- 
fully, his  refusal  to  rest  in  conventional  beliefs,  sometimes 
his  yearning  for  spiritual  rest  of  some  sort.  But  his  clear- 
est note  is  one  of  confidence  in  life  and  in  the  spirit  of 
man,  sounded  most  buoyantly  in  "Say  Not  the  Struggle 
Nought  Availeth." 


374  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  dictatorship  of  taste  which  Arnold  held  in  mat- 
ters of  literature,  was  held  in  matters  of  art  by  John 
Ruskin;  who  also  broadened  his  criticism,  as 

Ruskin:  His        j.JA          U-.L          L  •  r  •    i  j 

Early  Life        did   Arnold,   into    the   region    of   social   and 
and  Art  moral  ideals.     His  nature  was  a  more  ardent 

Criticism.  .  .  ,    .  .  ,  . 

one  than  Arnold  s;  and  his  crusade  against 
bad  art,  as  well  as  against  social  and  moral  falsehood, 
partook  of  the  Hebraic  intensity  of  Carlyle,  whose  disci- 
ple, indeed,  he  acknowledged  himself  to  be.  He  was  born 
in  1819.  His  father,  a  London  wine-merchant  of  wealth 
and  liberal  tastes,  gave  him  every  early  advantage  of 
education  and  travel.  Family  carriage  trips  through 
England,  France,  and  Switzerland  enabled  him  to  gather 
those  impressions  of  landscape  beauty  and  of  architec- 
tural effect,  which  he  afterward  put  to  remarkable  use 
in  his  critical  writings.  A  boyish  enthusiasm  for  the 
paintings  of  William  Turner  ripened  with  years  into  an 
ardent  championship  of  that  wonderful  artist,  then  ob- 
scure and  neglected.  In  the  first  volume  of  Modern 
Painters,  published  in  his  twenty-fourth  year,  Ruskin 
enshrined  Turner  as  the  greatest  of  English  landscape- 
painters.  In  doing  so,  however,  his  powers  of  analysis 
led  him  deep  into  the  abstract  theory  of  art;  and  in  the 
remainder  of  the  work,  published  at  intervals  during  the 
next  sixteen  years,  he  examined  many  types  and  schools 
of  painting,  separating  what  he  held  to  be  true  from  what 
he  held  to  be  false,  with  haughty  and  uncompromising 
assurance.  Meanwhile,  in  The  Seven  Lamps  of  Architec- 
ture^ (1849)  and  Stones  of  Venice  (1851-1853),  he  made  a 
similar  examination  of  the  principal  types  of  European 
architecture,  and  attempted  to  establish  similar  underly- 
ing principles  concerning  their  growth  and  decay,  their 
worth  and  worthlessness.  Many  of  Ruskin's  judgments 
must  of  course  be  dissented  from,  but  it  cannot  be  ques- 
tioned that  in  his  writings  art  criticism  was  put  for  the 
nrst  time  upon  a  broad  philosophic  basis.  He  believed 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  375 

the  springs  of  art  to  lie  deep  in  the  moral  nature  of  the 
artist,  and  in  the  moral  temper  of  the  age  and  nation 
which  produced  him.  Latent  or  expressed,  this  is  the 
pervading  idea  of  all  Ruskin's  art  criticism.  By  insist- 
ence upon  this  view,  by  eloquent  illustration  and  fiery 
defense  of  it,  he  gradually  led  his  readers  to  a  new  under- 
standing  of  the  spiritual  meaning  of  art,  and  awakened 
them  to  a  new  discrimination. 

In  1860,  at  forty  years  of  age,  Ruskin  finished  Modern 
Painters,  and  practically  closed  that  series  of  works 
which  had  made  him  the  foremost  art  critic 
of  the  century.  From  this  time  on  he  used  Ethical  and 
art  mainly  as  illustration  and  text,  by  means  Economic 
of  which  to  enforce  some  ethical,  economic, 
or  religious  lesson.  He  became  more  and  more  absorbed 
in  the  problems  of  socialism,  being  led  thereto  by  the  con- 
viction at  which  he  had  arrived  in  his  previous  work,  that 
all  great  art  must  be  national  and  social,  and  must  spring 
from  healthy  and  beautiful  conditions  of  life  in  the  society 
where  it  arises.  Modern  art  he  held  to  be,  with  a  few 
exceptions,  debased;  and  he  gradually  came  to  believe 
that  this  debasement  was  due  to  our  commercial  organi- 
zation of  society.  In  two  books,  Unto  This  Last  (1861) 
and  Munera  Pulveris  (1862),  he  protested  against  the 
received  theories  of  political  economy.  Wealth,  for  in- 
stance, he  conceived  to  consist  in  real  values  as  opposed 
to  exchange  values — in  Tintoretto's  damaged  frescos  in 
Venice  as  against  the  lithographs  sold  along  the  rue 
de  Rivoli  in  Paris.  Indeed,  he  held  that  the  latter 
city  was  in  effect  so  much  the  poorer  because  of  the  cost 
which  had  gone  into  the  production  of  such  intrinsically 
worthless  things.  Further,  he  held  that  the  question 
between  capital  and  labor  is  a  moral  question,  and  that 
the  capitalist  should  be  led  to  use  his  power,  not  to  tax 
more  and  more  heavily  the  labor  of  others,  but  to  make 
them  more  independent.  In  short,  he  held  that  the  aim 


376  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  political  economy,  in  distinction  from  "commercial 
economy,"  was  "the  multiplication  of  human  life  at  the 
highest  standard." 

His  most  popular  book,  Sesame  and  Lilies  (1865)  was 
in  part  a  side-product  of  his  thinking  on  political  econ- 
omy. In  the  first  division  of  the  book,  en- 
titled  "King's  Treasuries,"  he  holds  up  to 
censure  England's  absorption  in  worldly  suc- 
cess, as  opposed  to  spiritual  success.  To  the  "gospel  of 
getting  on,"  which  depends  for  its  appealing  power  upon 
the  idea  that  money  constitutes  the  only  real  "value," 
he  opposes  the  gospel  of  spiritual  wealth,  especially  as 
deposited  in  books,  those  King's  Treasuries  which  are 
the  real  centre  of  the  realm  of  "  value."  The  second  part, 
"Queen's  Gardens,"  is  Ruskin's  contribution  to  the 
"woman  problem"  of  the  century,  the  theme  being  the 
same  as  that  of  Tennyson's  Princess.  Sesame  and  Lilies 
is  written  in  a  style  of  wonderful  strength  and  richness. 
It  affords  perhaps  the  best  single  example  of  its  author's 
mastery  over  the  manifold  chords  of  prose  expression. 

As  he  went  on  in  years,  Ruskin's  sympathy  went  out 
more  and  more  to  the  oppressed  and  unjustly  treated  of 
this  world;  and  he  spent  a  large  part  of  his 
Years.  tmie  and  energy  in  attempting  to  help  the 

working  classes  by  word  and  deed.  To  them 
he  addressed  a  series  of  letters  entitled  Fors  Clavigera,1 
beginning  in  1871,  which  contain  his  views  on  economic, 
artistic,  and  religious  subjects  set  forth  sometimes  with 
the  most  winning  persuasion,  and  sometimes  with  furious 
invective.  In  1875  he  formed  a  society  afterward  called 
the  Guild  of  Saint  George,  in  which  he  attempted  to 
carry  into  practical  form  his  own  economic  and  social 
ideals,  with  a  large  admixture  of  the  spiritual  qualities  of 

iRuskin  points  out  that  Fors  Clavigera.  may  mean  Strength  as  Club- 
bearer,  Strength  as  Key-bearer,  or  Strength  as  Nail-bearer,  and  that  the 
title-  metaphorically  suggests  Strength  ol  Deed,  of  Patience  an^of  Law 


THE  VICTORIAN  ERA  377 

Carlyle.  The  vows  of  the  guild  enforced  the  virtues  of 
obedience,  industry,  and  unselfishness  in  a  form  suggest- 
ing knighthood.  The  order  was,  in  fact,  an  attempt  to 
restore  a  mediaeval  society  through  the  diffusion  of  the 
ideals  of  chivalry  among  its  members — to  realize  a  Utopia 
on  English  soil.  To  this  guild,  and  to  other  experiments 
in  housing  and  teaching  the  poor,  he  gave  ultimately  all 
his  fortune.  The  terrible  burden  of  arousing  England  to- 
a  sense  of  its  responsibility  in  the  face  of  monstrous- 
social  injustice  weighed  more  and  more  heavily  upon  him. 
Attacks  of  brain  fever  interrupted  his  work,  and  in  the 
intervals  of  mental  darkness  he  wrote  Pr&terita,  a  lovely 
and  naive  account  of  his  boyhood  and  youth.  During 
his  last  years  he  lived  at  Brantwood  among  the  English 
lakes,  and  there  he  died  in  1900. 

Ruskin  combined  many  gifts  and  qualities:  a  subtle 
intellect,  a  nervous  system  which  vibrated  intensely  to 
impressions  of  beauty  and  ugliness,  great 
moral  ardor,  marked  impatience  and  dogma- 
tism, and  a  marvellous  power  of  prose  expression.  His 
style  is  based  on  the  prose  of  the  English  Bible,  modified 
by  the  religious  writers  of  the  seventeenth  century,  espe- 
cially by  the  florid  style  of  Jeremy  Taylor;  and  it  is  en- 
riched by  a  unique  gift  of  description,  lyrical  in  movement 
and  splendid  in  color.  His  best  descriptive  passages,  for 
example  the  famous  dithyramb  on  Saint  Mark's  Cathe- 
dral in  Stones  of  Venice,  that  on  the  Falls  of  Schaffhausen, 
in  Modern  Painters,  or  that  on  the  Rhone  at  Geneva,  in 
Praterita,  are  among  the  capital  examples  of  ornate  prose 
in  English.  His  style  is  as  markedly  romantic,  in  its 
emotional  quality  and  its  search  after  beauty,  as  Arnold's 
is  classical  in  its  subordination  of  emotion  to  intellect, 
and  in  its  effort  to  secure  clearness  at  any  cost. 

One  of  the  important  services  of  Ruskin  as  art  critic 
was  to  defend  to  the  public  a  group  of  young  men  who 
sought  to  bring  back  technical  sincerity  and  spiritual 


378  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

truth  to  the  arts  of  painting  and  poetry.  They  found 
models  for  these  qualities  in  the  painters  and  poets  before 
Raphael,  who  had  treated  the  most  mystical 
The  Pre-  religious  themes  with  simple-hearted  realism, 
Movement.  and  thus  called  themselves  Preraphaelites. 
For  subjects,  as  well  as  for  inspiration,  the 
Preraphaelites  went  back  to  the  Middle  Age.  A  mysti- 
cal and  intangible  beauty  of  conception,  together  with  a 
kind  of  naive  earnestness  and  simplicity  of  treatment, 
characterized  their  work  both  in  painting  and  poetry. 
The  founder  of  the  Preraphaelite  Brotherhood  was  Dante 
Gabriel  Rossetti;  the  first  members  were  Londoners,  like 
himself;  but  some  of  the  most  enthusiastic  recruits  of  the 
Brotherhood  were  Oxford  men,  who  saw  in  it  an  attempt 
to  do  in  art  and  literature  what  Newman  had  tried  to 
do  in  the  church.  In  this  way  the  Preraphaelite  Move- 
ment is  the  child  and  heir  of  the  Oxford  Movement. 

Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  was  born  in  London  in  1828. 
His  father  was  an  Italian  patriot  and  exile;  his  mother  of 
mixed  English  and  Italian  blood.     In  1848  he 
Gabriel  definitely  adopted  the  career  of  painter,  and 

Rossetti.  in  the  same  year  founded  the  Preraphaelite 
Brotherhood.  Before  1850  he  had  produced 
such  pictures  as  "The  Girlhood  of  Mary"  and  "The 
Annunciation,"  which  are  representative  of  the  early 
principles  of  the  order.  In  that  year  the  Brotherhood 
founded  a  little  magazine  called  The  Germ,  which,  though 
it  ran  for  only  four  numbers,  is  famous  as  containing  the 
poem  which  best  illustrates  the  movement  on  its  literary 
side,  "The  Blessed  Damozel." 

The  Blessed   Damozel,   wearing   the   "white   rose   of 
Mary's  gift,"  and  holding  the  mystic  lilies,  leans  from  the 
"go^  ^ar  o*  heaven,"  yearning  for  her  earthly 
lover>  and  picturing  to  herself  the  time  when 
she  shall  lead  him  with  her  among  the  celes- 
tial groves  and  by  the  living  waters  of  God.     The  sights 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  379 

and  sounds  of  heaven  are  imaged  forth  in  the  poem  with 
a  concreteness  which  would  be  startling  if  it  were  not  so 
solemnized  by  spiritual  meaning  and  so  freighted  with 
spiritual  awe.  From  time  to  time,  as  the  poem  pro- 
gresses, our  minds  are  led  out  from  among  the  shadowy 
landscapes  and  the  indwelling  spirits  of  paradise,  down 
through  illimitable  star  spaces,  to  where  upon  earth  the 
lover  sits,  hearing  in  the  autumnal  rustle  of  the  leaves 
the  feet  of  his  beloved,  as  she  tries  to  reach  him  down 
the  echoing  stairs  of  the  sky.  Besides  the  touching  emo- 
tion of  the  poem,  the  wonderful  beauty  and  reach  of  its 
imagery,  it  has  a  melody  sweeter  and  more  sensitive  than 
Rossetti  ever  attained  afterward. 

The  union  of  simplicity  and  concreteness  with  spiritu- 
ality, which  makes  this  poem  typical  of  the  Preraphaelite 
aims  in  both  poetry  and  painting,  appears  equally  in 
another  early  poem  of  Rossetti's,  "My  Sister's  Sleep." 
The  strained  stillness  and  suspense  of  a  death-chamber, 
the  anguish  and  holy  fortitude  of  a  mother  in  the  pres- 
ence of  her  loss,  are  given  with  passionate  reserve  and 
tender  realism. 

A  considerable  portion  of  Rossetti's  verse  was  written 
in  his  early  life,  but  only  a  few  poems  were  then  published. 
In  his  thirty-second  year  he  married  a  Miss 
Siddall,  whose  rare  type  of  beauty  he  has 
immortalized  in  the  best-known  of  his  pic- 
tures, the  "Beata  Beatrix."  Two  years  after  the  mar- 
riage his  wife  died;  and  in  despair  at  his  loss,  Rossetti 
placed  in  her  coffin  all  his  unpublished  writings.  They 
remained  buried  until  1869,  when  they  were  exhumed  by 
his  friends  and  published  the  following  year.  This  vol- 
ume of  1870,  another  published  eleven  years  after,  and  a 
volume  of  translations  from  the  early  Italian  poets,  en- 
titled Dante  and  His  Circle,  constitute  the  whole  of  Ros- 
setti's poetical  output.  After  his  wife's  death  he  with- 
drew more  and  more  into  himself,  until  he  became  a  com- 


380  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

plete  recluse.  Intense  brooding  upon  his  loss,  added  to 
the  disastrous  effects  of  the  drug  which. he  took  as  a  relief 
from  insomnia,  made  his  life  a  tragedy  only  relieved  by 
the  creative  play  of  his  mind,  which  continued  to  embody 
itself  in  pictures  and  poems  of  strange  and  sometimes 
morbid  beauty.  He  died  in  1882. 

Rossetti's  work  illustrates  perfectly  the  romantic  ten- 
dency of  escape  from  the  actual  world.  This  tendency 
appears  in  his  long  poems  in  ballad  form, 
Bister  Helen,"  "The  Bride's  Prelude," 
"Rose  Mary,"  "The  King's  Tragedy."  More 
subtly  is  it  evident  in  such  studies  of  love  as  "  The  Stream's 
Secret"  and  "Love's  Nocturne,"  where  the  poet  strives 
to  penetrate  to  the  innermost  and  essential  secret  of  that 
mysterious  passion  which  swayed  his  life  as  it  did  that 
of  his  great  name-poet  Dante,  but  to  such  tragic  destiny. 
The  great  memorial  of  this  love  is  the  sonnet  sequence, 
TJie  House  of  Life.  This  in  the  final  form  which  it  took 
in  the  volume  of  1881  consists  of  one  hundred  and  one 
sonnets  dealing  with  the  poet's  love-history  and  loss  in  a 
manner  so  intricate  and  involved  that  the  passion  seems 
a  dream — of  marvellous  intensity  and  realism,  it  is  true — 
and  the  object  of  it  a  ghost  and  no  mortal  woman.  Love 
to  Browning  was  a  constructive  and  unifying  force;  to 
Rossetti  it  was  destructive,  disintegrating,  tending  by  the 
very  real  power  of  its  alchemy  to  make  man  less  real  in 
his  strength  of  personality  and  control  of  life. 

As  a  whole,  Rossetti's  poetry  is  marked  by  a  great  pic- 
turesqueness  and  visual  beauty.     It  is  "painter's  poetry," 

Rossetti's  in  that  its  aPPeal  is  constantly  to  the  eye. 
Poetic  style.  Music  it  has,  too,  but  the  tendency  to  load 
itself  with  elaborate  detail  often  defeats  the 
music,  and  makes  of  the  verse  a  kind  of  poetical  tapestry, 
stiff  with  emblazoned  images.  Where  it  is  not  the  poetry 
of  a  painter  it  is  the  poetry  of  a  prisoner  and  a  recluse. 
Outdoor  nature,  the  common  life  of  men,  appear  in  it 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  381 

seldom.  In  the  main,  its  atmosphere  is  close  and  heavily 
perfumed,  its  emotion  somewhat  morbid  and  cloying. 
It  is  the  poetry  of  a  nature  born  for  the  generous  sunlight 
and  color  of  Italy,  and  compelled  to  build  a  dream-world 
amid  the  chill  fog  and  bitter  smoke  of  London. 

In  the  earlier  pictures  of  Rossetti  appears  the  noble, 
serious  face  of  his  sister  Christina  (1832-1894),  who  sat 
as  his  model  for  the  youthful  Madonna.  She 
also  contributed  several  lyrics  to  The  Germ. 
Apart  from  her  personal  association  with  the 
Preraphaelites,  however,  she  holds  a  place  of  her  own  in 
English  poetry.  Her  longer  poems,  Goblin  Market  and 
The  Prince's  Progress,  appeared  in  1862  and  1866.  These 
as  well  as  her  lyrics  show  the  lovely  and  naive  simplicity 
which  was  the  essence  of  Preraphaelitism.  As  a  religious 
poet  she  is  the  opposite  of  Clough.  Christina  Rossetti 
was  assured  of  her  Anglican-Catholic  faith;  to  it  she  gave 
up  her  life,  with  love  and  its  promise  of  earthly  happi- 
ness. Her  poetry,  both  of  loVe  and  religion,  is,  therefore, 
born  of  experience  and  has  the  truth  of  sacrifice. 
•  One  of  the  young  Oxford  men  who  was  drawn  to  Ros- 
setti by  kinship  in  interests  was  William  Morris  (1834- 
1896).  Indeed,  before  his  acquaintance  with 
Rossetti  and  the  London  group,  he  and  his  ^mi^ 
friends,  conspicuous  among  whom  was  the  Early  Poems, 
painter  Edward  Burne- Jones,  were  showing 
the  influence  of  the  Oxford  Movement,  and  were  absorbed 
in  mediaeval  feeling  and  study  of  religious  architecture 
and  literature.  In  1856  Morris  at  his  own  expense  es- 
tablished The  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Magazine,  in  which 
appeared  some  of  Rossetti's  poems,  as  well  as  his  own. 
These  last  by  1858  had  grown  into  a  volume  which  he 
called  The  Defense  of  Guenevere,  from  the  opening  poem 
in  which  the  sinful  Queen  throws  back  her  hair  from  her 
cheek  of  flame  to  tell  Sir  Gawaine  and  his  knights  that 
they  lie.  It  is  clear  from  this  first  poem  that  we  are  in  a 


382  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

different  world  from  that  of  Tennyson's  Idylls  of  the  King. 
Here  there  is  no  note  of  modern  meaning — only  an  at- 
tempt to  give  in  utter  sincerity  the  psychology  and  the 
sentiment  of  the  mediaeval  soul.  Most  of  the  poems  deal 
with  a  later  epoch  than  that  of  King  Arthur,  especially  the 
fourteenth  century  and  the  great  wars  between  the  Eng- 
lish and  French.  In  "The  Eve  of  Crecy"  and  "The  Gil- 
liflower  of  Gold"  Morris  touches  on  the  joyous  adventure 
of  knighthood;  in  "Shameful  Death"  and  "The  Haystack 
in  the  Floods"  he  dwells  on  the  darker  sides  of  mediaeval 
life,  its  violence  and  terrible  ferocity;  in  "Sir  Peter  Harp- 
don's  End"  he  gives  a  story  of  devotion  of  the  knight 
who  holds  his  castle  for  the  English  until  he  is  taken  and- 
put  to  death.  In  "The  Sailing  of  the  Sword,"  "The 
Blue  Closet,"  and  "The  Wind"  he  presents  aspects 
purely  picturesque  and  fanciful,  sometimes  mere  flashes 
of  color. 

Nine  years  later  (1867)  Morris  published  his  second 
volume  of  poetry,  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason.  It  is  in 
striking  contrast  to  the  first.  We  seem  to 
emerge  from  a  forest  full  of  grotesque  and 
terrible  things  upon  a  plain  bright  with  sun- 
shine; we  pass  from  the  world  of  the  Holy  Grail  to  the 
world  of  the  Golden  Fleece.  And  yet  the  treatment  of 
the  myth  is  mediaeval  in  that  the  poem  is  written  in  the 
same  diffuse,  soft-colored,  gently  flowing  verse  in  which 
the  Norman-French  trouveres  had  sung  the  adventures  of 
their  knights  and  paladins.  Shortly  after  The  Life  and 
Death  of  Jason  Morris  published  the  first  part  of  a  collec- 
tion of  similar  tales,  called  The  Earthly  Paradise,  which 
he  completed  in  1871.  In  this  volume  the  narratives 
are  held  together  by  an  ingenious  scheme,  analogous  to 
that  which  Chaucer  used  in  binding  together  his  Can- 
terbury Tales.  A  band  of  Northmen,  sailing  westward 
in  their  viking  ships,  are  cast  ashore  upon  the  Island  of 
Atlantis,  the  earthly  paradise  of  which  the  Greek  poets 


THE   VICTORIAN  ERA  383 

dreamed.  Here  they  find  dwelling  a  fortunate  race  cf 
men,  who  in  times  long  past  have  come  hither  from 
Greece  and  Asia  Minor.  The  newcomers  remain  through 
the  changing  seasons  of  a  year,  telling  stories  of  their 
northern  land,  of  "The  Lovers  of  Gudrun"  and  "The 
Fostering  of  Aslaug,"  and  listening  to  the  tales  which  the 
islanders  have  brought  from  their  ancient  home,  of 
"Atalanta's  Race"  and  "The  Love  of  Alcestis."  But 
whatever  are  the  sources  of  the  stories,  whether  class- 
ical, northern,  or  oriental,  the  style  in  which  they 
are  written  is  always  that  of  the  mediaeval  romances; 
even  the  metres  employed  are  those  familiar  to  Chaucer 
and  the  French  trouveres.  The  philosophy,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  pagan,  with  the  pessimism  peculiar  to  the  Greek 
as  he  thought  on  the  passing  of  youth  and  the  brevity  of 
life.  Death  is  the  motive  of  the  whole  poem.  The  fear 
of  death  drives  the  wanderers  forth  on  their  voyage  in 
search  of  the  earthly  paradise;  it  appears  in  every  tale. 
King  Admetus  would  be  happy  but 

That  all  those  pageants  soon  should  be  passed  by, 
And  hid  by  night  the  fair  spring  blossoms  lie. 

Gregory,  in  "The  Land  East  of  the  Sun,"  falls  thinking 

Of  what  a  rude  and  friendless  place 

The  world  was;  through  what  empty  days 

Men  were  pushed  slowly  down  to  death. 

At  best  life  is 

A  checkered  day  of  sunshine  and  of  flowers, 
Fading  to  twilight  and  dark  night  at  last. 

In  this  pessimism  Morris  reflected  the  mood  which  was 
spreading  over  England,  as  the  result  of  the  loss  of  the 
consolations  of  religious  faith,  and  of  the  doubt  of  social 
reform  to  deal  with  the  increasing  misery  of  the  poor — a 


384  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

mood  from  which  no  romantic  device  could  completely 
escape. 

Literature  was  with  Morris  only  one  of  many  activities. 
His  was  a  life  of  ceaseless  labor  in  many  fields  of  industry. 

He  began  life  as  an  architect,  abandoned  this 
Morris's  career  for  painting,  drifted  at  length  into  the 
Xrwr"*1  designing  and  manufacturing  of  furniture, 

wall-paper,  and  textile  fabrics,  and  toward  the 
close  of  his  life  turned  his  exhaustless  energy  into  artistic 
printing  and  bookbinding.  He  worked  alwajs  in  the 
spirit  of  a  mediaeval  master-craftsman,  to  whom  beauty 
and  honesty  of  workmanship  were  a  religion.  His  sin- 
cerity, versatility,  and  skill  made  an  epoch  in  the  history 
of  household  decoration;  and  as  the  impulse  given  by 
him  has  broadened  and  popularized  itself,  the  surround- 
ings of  ordinary  domestic  life  have  been  beautified  for 
multitudes.  With  all  this  business  and  industrial  life  he 
continued  to  produce  literature  as  a  by-product,  for,  as 
he  said:  "If  a  chap  can't  compose  an  epic  poem  while 
he's  weaving  a  tapestry  he's  no  good  at  all."  He  gave  a 
version  of  Sigurd  the  Volsung,  and  translated  other 
northern  stories,  including  Beowulf,  as  well  as  Virgil  and 
Homer.  Late  in  his  life  he  produced  a  series  of  romances, 
in  poetic  prose,  dealing  with  the  primitive  life  of  our 

northern  ancestors;  the  most  notable  are  per- 
lu^ces.  haPs  The  House  °f  the  Wolfings,  The  Roots  of 

the  Mountains,  and  The  Story  of  the  Glittering 
Plain.  In  them  he  succeeded  in  importing  into  English 
literature  the  spirit  of  the  northern  saga,  not,  to  be  sure, 
without  some  artificiality,  but  nevertheless  with  great 
picturesqueness  and  romantic  charm. 

Morris's  industrial  experiences  gradually  led  him  to 
ffis  the  conviction  that  the  bases  of  modern  com- 

Sodaiism.        mercialism  were  false,  and  he  threw  himself 

with  heart  and  soul  into  the  socialistic  move- 
ment then  beginning  to  gain  headway  in  England.  Two 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  385 

of  his  romances,  News  from  Nowhere  and  The  Dream  of 
John  Ball,  are  attempts  to  imagine  a  new  organization  of 
society;  and  some  of  his  later  poems  are  chants  of  proph- 
ecy and  hope  for  the  longed-for  era  of  social  justice.  In 
the  prelude  to  The  Earthly  Paradise  he  calls  himself  "  the 
idle  singer  of  an  empty  day";  but  this  "idle  singer"  was 
a  man  who  spent  the  greater  portion  of  his  time  and 
strength  working  in  shop  and  designing-room  to  make 
the  world  as  it  is  a  more  livable  place,  and  who,  as  experi- 
ence thus  gained  gave  him  prompting,  tried  with  all  ear- 
nestness to  indicate  what  seemed  to  him  a  higher  basis 
for  the  social  life  of  man. 

The  pessimism  which  has  been  spoken  of  as  character- 
istic of  the  concluding  decades  of  the  century  finds  most 
poignant  utterance  in  the  Rubaiyat  of  Omar  Th 
Khayyam,  by  Edward  Fitzgerald  (1809-1883).  "Rubaiyat 
Although  this  is  called  a  translation,  it  is  of  Omar 
really  an  original  poem,  based  on  the  scat- 
tered fragments  of  the  old  astronomer-poet  of  Persia, 
who  lived  in  the  twelfth  century.  Fitzgerald  published 
his  poem  in  1859,  but  sold  only  a  few  copies.  He  con- 
tinued to  revise  and  enlarge  it  through  several  editions, 
and  lived  to  see  it  one  of  the  most  widely  read  books  of 
the  day.  It  popularized  orientalism  as  the  Preraphaelite 
Movement  had  popularized  mediaevalism ;  it  expressed  in 
memorable  form  the  questionings  in  regard  to  the  worth 
of  life  which  were  being  asked  more  insistently.  In  its 
frank  acceptance  of  pleasure  as  the  only  justification  and 
alleviation  of  life,  it  prepared  the  way  for  a  sort  of  neo- 
paganism,  in  which  the  final  effort  to  escape  from  the 
burdens  and  problems  of  society,  and  from  the  moral 
seriousness  with  which  most  of  the  Victorian  writers  came 
to  face  them,  found  voice. 

This  last  phase  of  romanticism  is  illustrated  in  the 
early  poetry  of  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne  (1837-1909). 
Swinburne  was  at  Oxford  in  1857,  and  had  some  per- 


386  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sonal  association  with  the  Preraphaelites,  but  his  genius 
was  too  eclectic  to  permit  him  to  confine  himself  to 

one  school.  In  1864  he  published  his  first 
Algernon  experiment  in  classical  tragedy,  Atalanta  in 
Sw^ume.  Calydon.  Two  years  later  he  brought  out 

the  first  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads.  In 
these  he  deliberately  and  indeed  ostentatiously  repudiated 
those  standards  of  feeling  and  conduct  which  the  modern 
world  cherishes  as  its  hardest-won  heritage  from  nineteen 
centuries  of  Christianity.  He  went  back  for  his  inspira- 
tion to  paganism,  and  too  often  not  to  the  vigorous  early 
periods  of  paganism,  but  to  its  later  ones,  when  men,  cal- 
lous or  indifferent  to  the  moral  issues  of  life,  sought  to 
lose  themselves  in  feverish  self-indulgence,  or  in  the 
quietism  of  pessimism;  grateful 

That  no  life  lives  forever, 
That  dead  men  rise  up  never, 
That  even  the  weariest  river 
Winds  somewhere  safe  to  sea. 

This  neopagan  side,  however,  is  but  one  of  many  in 
Swinburne's  work.  He,  like  Tennyson  and  Browning,  is 

an  eclectic,  drawing  material  from  every  store- 
Themes^6  £  house.  More  than  any  other  poet  does  he 

take  his  themes  and  inspiration  directly  from 
literature.  He  has  expressed  his  literary  judgments  not 
only  in  prose  criticism  but  in  verse,  in  his  memorial  poems 
on  the  French  romanticists,  Charles  Baudelaire  and  The- 
ophile  Gautier,  as  well  as  his  sonnets  on  the  Elizabethan 
playwrights,  in  which  often  the  quality  of  the  man,  ob- 
scure save  for  his  work,  is  flashed  in  an  unforgettable 
impression.  His  fondness  for  such  extreme  and  morbid 
types  of  romanticism  belongs  to  Swinburne's  quality  of 
decadence.  It  was  in  part,  however,  their  love  of  free- 
dom and  their  youthful  impatience  of  control  that  at- 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  387 

tracted  him  to  his  literary  idols.  No  one  has  surpassed 
him  in  his  praise  of  Shelley,  or  of  Marlowe — 

With  mouth  of  gold,  and  morning  in  his  eyes. 

Of  political  freedom  and  hatred  of  tyranny  he  has  sung 
gloriously.  Perhaps  this  ideal  of  freedom  is  in  part  re- 
sponsible for  his  love  of  the  sea,  the  poetry  of  which  he 
has  given  with  unexampled  beauty  and  force.  Apart 
from  the  sea,  his  view  of  nature  is  usually  morbid,  dwell- 
ing on  aspects  of  decay  and  death.  On  the  other  hand, 
he  has  an  exquisite  perception  of  the  beauty  and  pathos 
of  child-life.  Besides  his  voluminous  lyrical  work,  he  has 
essayed  epic  narrative  in  Tristram  of  Lyonesse;  and  he 
has  produced  a  number  of  dramas,  some,  like  Chastelard 
and  Marino  Faliero,  being  studies  in  the  Elizabethan 
manner,  others,  as  Atalanta  in  Calydon  and  Erechtheus, 
being  written  on  the  Greek  model. 

Whatever  may  be  the  intellectual  or  moral  value  of 
Swinburne's  poetry,  it  is  certain  that  as  a  technical  mas- 
ter of  verse,  as  a  musician  in  words,  he  is 
very  great.  Especially  in  the  more  rapid  and  Mastery!8 
impetuous  rhythms  he  has  shown  himself 
able  to  push  out  the  boundaries  of  his  art,  and  to  enter 
regions  of  verse -music  unknown  before.  For  a  union  of 
"splendor  and  speed"  his  poetic  style  is  unequalled  by 
any  other  poet  of  the  Victorian  age.  His  faults  are  those 
of  mannerism  and  device,  of  diffuseness  and  over-orna- 
mentation, of  a  tendency  to  clothe  trivial  thoughts  in 
sweeping  and  resounding  phrase. 

His  excellences  are  present  in  the  highest  degree,  and 
his  faults  almost  absent,  in  his  masterpiece,  Atalanta  in 
Calydon,  which  ranks  almost  on  a  level  with 
the  Samson  Agonistes  of  Milton  as  an  attempt 
to  give  in  English  verse  the  essential  form 
and  spirit  of  Greek  drama.  The  subject  of  Swinburne's 


388  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

poem  is  the  hunting  of  the  wild  boar  in  Calydon,  the  love 
of  Meleager  for  the  maiden-huntress  Atalanta,  and  his 
death  at  the  hands  of  his  mother.  The  action  moves 
with  stately  swiftness,  in  obedience  to  the  strict  canons 
of  Greek  forni;  the  pathos  is  deep  and  genuine;  and  the 
music,  especially  in  the  choruses,  is  splendid  in  range  and 
sweep. 

Walter  Horatio  Pater  (1830-1894)  represents  the  eclec- 
tic nature  of  the  time  in  a  more  conscious  mingling  of 
elements,,  classical  and  romantic,  Christian 
and  pagan.  Pater  was  an  Oxford  man,  a 
fellow  of  Brazenose  College,  where  he  spent  much  of  his 
life  in  seclusion  from  the  busy  world  and  occupied  with 
questions  of  beauty  and  taste.  His  first  volume,  The 
Renaissance  (1873),  is  a  series  of  studies  of  significant 
figures  in  that  movement,  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Sandro 
Botticelli.  Joachim  du  Bellay,  and  others.  Another  group 
of  critical  essays  he  collected  in  Appreciations  (1889), 
which  contains  studies  of  Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  Ros- 
setti,  and  others.  Pater's  criticism  is  frankly  impres- 
sionistic in  that  he  is  satisfied  to  record  his  own  reaction 
to  works  of  art;  his  delicate  sensitiveness  to  beauty  in  all 
forms  makes  these  studies  most  subtly  penetrating  and 
illuminating.  Pater  used  fiction  as  well  as  criticism,  but 
fiction  of  a  classical  restraint,  to  be  compared  with  Lan- 
dor's  Imaginary  Conversations.  In  Marius  the  Epicurean 
(1885)  he  gives  us  the  life  of  a  Roman  youth  in  the  age 
of  the  Antonines — an  exquisite  picture — and  in  Imaginary 
Portraits  (1887)  he  sketches  four  figures  which  suggest 
the  individual  character  and  atmosphere  of  different 
periods  and  countries.  His  interest  in  classical  studies 
showed  itself  'further  in  Plato  and  Platonism  (1893) 
and  Greek  Studies  (1895),  essays  collected  after  his 
death. 

Although  Pater's   own   work  is   classical  in  restraint 
and    finish,  he   was    hospitable    to    the   romantic   point 


THE   VICTORIAN   ERA  389 

of  view.  Indeed  his  penetrating  search  for  rare  and 
strange  forms  of  beauty  delighted  in  the  romantic  qual- 
ities and  aspects  of  classical  life  and  art, 
and  in  the  classical  elements  in  romantic  pe-  Pater's 
riods.  The  Renaissance  as  the  meeting-point  Of  Life°P  J 
of  the  two  tendencies  was  peculiarly  fasci- 
nating to  him.  Similar  is  his  attitude  toward  the  min- 
gling of  paganism  and  Christianity.  In  Marius  the  Epi- 
curean he  pictures  most  sympathetically  the  youthful 
Christianity  in  the  age  of  Marcus  Aurelius;  in  "Denys 
1'Auxerrois"  (Imaginary  Portraits]  he  portrays  the  in- 
stinctive return  to  paganism  in  the  early  Renaissance. 
His  philosophy  of  life  is  a  scientific  paganism.  In  the 
concluding  chapter  of  The  Renaissance  he  finds  that 
physical  life  is  a  constantly  changing  combination  of 
natural  elements,  "phosphorus,  and  lime,  and  delicate 
fibres,"  and  that  the  mental  life  also  is  a  group  of  im- 
pressions, "unstable,  flickering,  inconsistent  ...  all  that 
is  actual  in  it  being  a  single  moment  ...  of  which  it 
may  ever  be  more  truly  said  that  it  has  ceased  to  be 
than  that  it  is."  Such  being  the  case,  then,  the  true  use 
of  these  moments  is  to  make  each  yield  the  most  poign- 
ant and  exquisite  sensation  of  which  it  is  capable.  "  Every 
moment  some  form  grows  perfect  in  hand  or  face; 
some  tone  on  the  hills  or  the  sea  is  choicer  than  the  rest; 
some  mood  of  passion  or  insight  or  intellectual  excite- 
ment is  irresistibly  real  and  attractive  for  us — for  that 
moment  only."  This  is  pure  paganism — a  philosophic  ex- 
pression of  "  Gather  ye  rosebuds  while  ye  may."  But 
it  is  to  be  noted  that  Pater  makes  the  final  test  of  a  life 
so  lived  and  trained  in  appreciation  of  this  world,  the 
Christian  one  of  willingness  to  sacrifice  it.  Marius  lays 
down  his  life  that  his  Christian  friend  Cornelius  may 
escape;  Sebastian  van  Storck  (Imaginary  Portraits}  dies 
to  save  an  unknown  child.  These  are,  however,  not  ex- 
amples of  the  Christian  doctrine  that  "he  who  loseth  his 


3QO  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

life  for  my  sake  shall  find  it,"  but  rather  fulfilments  of 
the  pagan  conception  in  which  the  last  exquisite  sensa- 
tion and  noble  emotion  of  a  life  consists  in  giving  up 
that  life  for  others. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE    NINETEENTH    CENTURY:   THE   NOVEL 

THE  novel  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  broader  and 
more  complex  than  that  of  the  eighteenth,  by  virtue  of 
the  greater  breadth  and  complexity  of  the 

IT          !•  i      -^    i_  •  rrM  The  Novel 

life  which  it  has  essayed  to  picture.  The  in  the 
three  departments  of  fiction,  the  romance,  the  Nineteenth 
realistic  study  of  manners,  and  the  story  with 
a  purpose,  persist,  but  the  range  of  each  is  vastly  extended. 
The  increase  in  knowledge  of  the  past  and  of  strange  lands, 
which  the  century  has  brought,  has  thrown  open  to  the 
romanticist  two  great  sources  of  material.  The  exten- 
sion of  the  reading  public,  and  the  growth  of  curiosity 
concerning  the  circumstances  of  man's  life  under  varying 
conditions,  have  caused  the  realistic  novel  to  widen  its 
scope.  The  world  of  fiction  in  the  eighteenth  century  is 
a  small  one;  its  characters  are,  with  a  few  notable  excep- 
tions, drawn  from  the  leisure  class  and  its  dependents; 
they  have  usually  no  business  in  life  beyond  carrying  on 
the  action  of  the  story.  But  in  the  nineteenth  century 
we  have  novels  which  deal  specifically  with  the  life  of  the 
sea,  the  army,  crime,  sport,  commerce,  toil,  politics,  and 
the  church;  and  with  the  special  difficulties,  dangers,  and 
temptations  which  each  career  involves.  Finally,  the 
deeper  thought  of  the  century,  bearing  fruit  in  rapid 
social  changes,  has  given  to  the  novel  of  purpose  greater 
dignity  and  power.  The  attempt  to  reform  government 
and  institutions,  the  labor  movement  of  which  Chartism 
was  one  manifestation,  the  so-called  conflict  between  sci- 
ence and  faith,  all  have  been  reflected  in  novels,  and  have 
been  in  turn  influenced  by  them.  As  the  novel  has  thus 
391 


392  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

gained  in  general  scope,  the  three  departments  of  fiction 
have  lost  in  large  measure  their  exclusive  character.  The 
romancer,  in  using  material  gathered  in  study  or  travel, 
has  come  to  have  something  of  the  conscientiousness  of 
the  realist.  The  realist  has  found  romantic  possibilities 
in  actual  life;  the  advance  of  science,  leading  to  startling 
discoveries  in  the  physical  and  mental  world,  has  given  him 
means  of  arousing  wonder  and  terror,  more  effective  than 
those  afforded  by  gothic  machinery.  And  finally  the 
novelist  with  a  purpose  has  found  in  the  realistic  picture 
of  things  as  they  are  one  of  the  most  potent  forces  of  rev- 
olution. 

The  work  of  Maria  Edgeworth  (1767-1849)  forms  an 
interesting  link  between  the  novel  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  that  of  the  nineteenth.     She  was  a 
follower  of  Miss  Burney  in  the  effort  to  paint 


contemporary  society.  Like  her  predecessor, 
she  shared  in  the  rather  shallow  social  purpose  of  the 
eighteenth  century;  her  general  aim,  as  set  forth  in  the  in- 
troduction to  her  novel  Patronage  (1814),  "the  inculcation 
of  simplicity  and  morality  in  an  artificial  and  recklessly 
frivolous  age,"  is  one  which  Addison  would  have  ap- 
plauded. But  her  purpose  is  often  more  definite  than 
this;  and  in  several  particulars  her  work  suggests  the 
course  which  the  novel  was  to  take  in  the  future.  Her 
long  residence  in  Ireland  interested  her  in  social  conditions 
in  that  island,  and  she  wrote  earnestly  to  improve  them. 
The  Absentee^  (1812)  is  both  a  satire  against  the  Irish  land- 
lord who  ruins  himself  in  London  society  and  a  moving 
picture  of  the  evils  which  his  folly  brings  on  his  native 
land.  In  Ireland,  too,  Miss  Edgeworth  had  an  opportu- 
nity to  study  life  in  what  to  her  readers  were  remote  con- 
ditions. Her  first  and  best  story,  the  little  masterpiece 
called  Castle  Rackrent  (1800),  is  the  account  of  the  for- 
tunes of  a  decaying  family,  as  seen  through  the  shrewd 
eyes  and  told  by  the  witty  Irish  tongue  of  an  old  servant. 


THE   NOVEL  393 

It  has  the  distinction  of  having  suggested  to  Sir  Walter 
Scott  that  true  local  color  could  be  made  as  effective  a 
background  as  false,  and  that  the  romantic  interest  could 
be  united  with  an  effort  to  portray  life  as  it  is. 

The  wide  range  of  Miss  Edgeworth's  work  emphasizes 
by  contrast  the  narrow  field  occupied  by  Jane  Austen 
(1775-1817),  whose  novels  deal  with  life  in 
the  country,  where  the  traditions  of  the  eight-  **' 
eenth  century  lingered  undisturbed.  In  Miss  Austen's 
case,  as  earlier  in  Fielding's  and  later  in  Thackeray's,  the 
realistic  impulse  was  in  part  a  reaction  from  romantic  or 
sentimental  views  of  life,  and  first  expressed  itself  as  bur- 
lesque. Two  of  her  early  stories,  Northanger  Abbey  and 
Sense  and  Sensibility,  she  wrote  with  the  obvious  purpose 
of  opposing  to  the  impossible  situations  and  strained 
emotions  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  her  school  a  humorously 
sensible  picture  of  life  and  love  as  they  are.  From  the 
outset  Miss  Austen  limited  her  view  to  the  world  that  she 
knew,  and  the  influences  that  she  saw  at  work.  She  was 
the  daughter  of  a  clergyman,  and  except  for  an  occasional 
visit  to  a  watering-place  like  Bath  or  Lyme,  she  spent  her 
youth  in  a  country  parish.  Her  acquaintance  included 
county  families,  clergymen,  and  naval  officers — for  her 
brothers  were  in  the  navy.  The  chief  business  of  these 
people,  as  Miss  Austen  saw  them,  was  attention  to  social 
duties;  and  their  chief  interest  was  matrimony.  This 
world  Miss  Austen  represents  in  her  novels;  outside  of  it 
she  never  steps.  And  even  in  this  petty  world  she  takes 
account  chiefly  of  its  pettiness.  The  great  things  of  life, 
passion,  and  moral  purpose,  the  interests  of  the  artist, 
the  lover,  the  saint,  may  as  well  be  presented  on  a  small 
stage  as  on  a  large  one,  as  well  amid  the  society  of  a 
cathedral  city  as  in  London;  but  these  things  did  not 
enter  into  Miss  Austen's  experience,  and  she  had  no  great 
insight  or  imaginative  sympathy  to  carry  her  beyond  her 
own  observation.  There  is  scarcely  any  feeling  for  ex- 


394  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ternal  nature  in  her  stories,  except  in  Persuasion,  the  lat- 
est of  them.  There  is  little  passion;  the  language  of 
emotion  is  usually  forced  and  conventional.  "Sense  is 
the  foundation  on  which  everything  good  may  be  based," 
she  says  in  Sense  and  Sensibility.  Her  view 
?er.  of  evil  is  superficial.  One  suspects  that  her 

Limitations.  \  j./r  *.    t 

estimate  of  life  was  not  very  dinerent  irom 
that  expressed  by  Mr.  Bennet  in  Pride  and  Prejudice: 
"For  what  do  we  live  but  to  make  sport  for  our  neigh- 
bors and  to  laugh  at  them  in  our  turn?" 

But  if  her  range  was  thus  limited,  within  it  she  was 
supreme.  Absolutely  sure  of  her  material,  undistracted 
by  external  interests,  she  wrote  with  a  singu- 
lar  freedom  from  uncertainty;  and  her  novels 
have,  in  consequence,  an  exactness  of  struc- 
ture and  a  symmetry  of  form  which  are  to  be  found  more 
often  in  French  literature  than  in  English.  Of  this  pre- 
cision Pride  and  Prejudice  is  an  admirable  example. 
There  the  plot  is  the  chief  interest;  simple,  but  pervading 
the  entire  book;  controlling  every  incident,  but  itself  de- 
pending for  its  outcome  upon  the  development  or  revela- 
tion of  the  principal  characters.  Surrounding  these  char- 
acters is  the  world  of  provincial  folk  which  Miss  Austen 
handled  with  such  brilliancy — cynical  Mr.  Bennet  and 
his  fatuous  wife;  Mary  Bennet  the  pedant,  and  Lydia 
the  flirt;  Mr.  Collins  the  type  of  pretentious  conceit,  and 
Sir  William  Lucas  of  feeble  dulness.  These  "humors" 
Miss  Austen  develops  chiefly  in  speech,  by  her  wonderful 
faculty  of  saying  the  thing  that  belongs  to  the  character 
at  the  moment.  Not  only  is  the  proper  sentiment  caught, 
but  the  turn  of  phrase,  the  manner,  almost  the  modula- 
tion ot  the  voice.  Not  only  is  this  true  of  the  limited 
characters  who  react  always  in  the  same  way;  in  the  sus- 
tained scenes  also  between  the  more  developed  persons, 
where  the  dialogue  is  more  highly  charged,  Miss  Austen 
shows  dramatic  power  of  the  highest  order.  One  of  the 


THE    NOVEL  395 

best  of  these  scenes  is  that  between  Elizabeth  Bennet  and 
Lady  Catherine  de  Burgh,  in  which  Elizabeth  like  a  good 
swordsman,  light  on  her  feet  and  ever  ready,  completely 
disarms  her  lumbering  opponent.  Miss  Austen's  later 
stories,  Mansfield  Park  and  Emma,  are  longer  and  slightly 
more  elaborate  than  Pride  and  Prejudice,  but  in  them  the 
essentials  of  her  art  are  still  the  same;  a  well-defined  story, 
growing  naturally  out  of  the  influence  of  character  on 
character,  and  developed  in  the  midst  of  a  society  full  of 
the  mild  humors  of  provincial  life. 

Miss  Austen  shows  to  the  full  the  realist's  tendency 
to  accept  the  world  in  an  ironical  spirit,  and  to  find  in  it 
such  amusement  as  it  offers.  The  romantic  impulse  to 
seek  for  enjoyment  in  a  world  of  greater  interest  or  of 
greater  opportunity  for  imagination,  is  brilliantly  repre- 
sented in  the  works  of  the  greatest  of  English  romancers, 
Sir  Walter  Scott.  , 

Scott  began  his  career  as  a  novelist  late  in  life.  It  was 
not  until  he  was  forty- three  that,  finding  his  vogue  as  a 
poet  diminishing  before  Byron's  popularity, 
he  finished  a  tale  that  he  had  begun  some 
nine  years  before.  This  was  published  anon- 
ymously in  1814  under  the  name  Waverley,  a  title  which 
was  applied  to  the  long  series  of  novels  which  followed. 
Some  of  these,  like  Guy  Mannering  (1815),  Old  Mortality 
(1816),  The  Heart  of  Midlothian  (1818),  deal  with  Scot- 
land; others,  like  Ivanhoe  (1820),  Kenilworth  (1821),  The 
Fortunes  of  Nigel  (1822),  are  concerned  with  English  his- 
tory; several,  like  Quentin  Durward  (1823)  and  The  Talis- 
man (1825),  transfer  the  scene  to  the  Continent.  In  1826 
a  printing-house,  of  which  Scott  was  a  member,  failed 
for  £117,000,  the  whole  of  which  debt  he  felt  bound  to 
assume.  He  wrote  his  latest  books  to  get  money  to  dis- 
charge this  obligation,  and  had  actually  paid  more  than 
half  when  he  died  in  1832.  The  rest  was  paid  by  the  sale 
of  the  copyrights  on  his  earlier  books. 


396  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Scott's  b'fe  was  a  blending  of  the  old  and  the  new.  He 
tried  to  be  both  a  feudal  lord  and  a  modern  business  man, 
and  both  attempts  are  curiously  connected 
Romanticism  w^  ^s  uterarv  career.  He  wrote  partly  for 
the  pleasure  of  creating  in  fiction  the  feudal 
ideal  that  he  sought  to  realize  in  his  life  at  Abbotsford, 
partly  for  the  money  with  which  to  sustain  that  experi- 
ment. Part  of  his  success  in  his  own  day  must  be  ac- 
counted for  by  the  fact  that  his  practical  interests  were 
those  which  his  fellow  men  could  comprehend.  Scott 
was  not  a  romanticist  in  the  sense  in  which  Coleridge  was, 
or  Shelley.  He  did  not  desire  spiritual  freedom;  he  was 
not  conscious  of  the  trammels  of  an  ordered,  conventional 
life;  he  had  no  dislike  of  the  political  and  social  world  as 
it  existed,  no  leanings  toward  revolution.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  he  had  in  his  blood  an  ardent  love  for  Scot- 
land, and  an  intimate  sympathy  with  Scotchmen;  he  had, 
too,  a  fascinated  view  of  the  past.  Thus  he  represented 
the  simple,  permanent  elements  of  romanticism,  the  ele- 
ments which  his  public  were  prepared  to  accept;  and  thus 
to  an  audience  which  neglected  Wordsworth  and  flouted 
Shelley,  Scott  became  the  prophet  of  a  new  literary 
faith. 

His  native  land  and  its  people  Scott  learned  to  know  at 
first  hand,  in  his  frequent  journeys  through  the  Border 
His  use  f  Countrv  and  the  Highlands.  He  was  the 
Scene!60  first  British  novelist  to  make  a  background 
actually  studied  from  nature  a  pervading  and 
essential  element  in  his  work.  His  descriptions  of  scen- 
ery are,  it  is  true,  old-fashioned  in  method,  unreasonably 
long,  and  full  of  detail;  but  they  have  an  exact  and  vivid 
realism  that  goes  far  to  reward  the  reader's  patience. 
Moreover,  the  frequency  with  which  the  place  determines 
the  event  shows  that  in  Scott's  drama  scene  is.  a  vital 
element,  not  a  mere  decorative  drop-curtain  which  inter- 
rupts the  action. 


THE   NOVEL  397 

The  natural  background  in  Scott's  work  is,  however, 
less  wonderful  than  the  human.  It  is  noteworthy  that, 
even  as  early  as  Waverley,  his  first  novel, 
Scott  recognized  his  chief  strength  to  lie  in  cijracters 
his  knowledge  of  Scotch  types.  After  some 
hesitation  at  the  outset  of  the  story,  he  starts  his  hero 
for  Scotland,  and  plunges  him  into  a  society  composed 
of  Baron  Bradwardine,  Laird  Balmawhapple,  and  Baillie 
Macwheeble,  with  David  Gellatley  and  Old  Janet  for 
dependents.  These  local  types,  which  Scott  drew  so 
abundantly,  are  treated  broadly  for  the  humor  and  the 
pathos  of  humanity  warped  by  circumstances  into  a 
hundred  fantastic  forms,  but  capable  of  sometimes  throw- 
ing itself  into  an  attitude  of  noble  disinterestedness,  of 
dignified  endurance,  or  of  tragic  despair.  When  the  his- 
toric drama  of  the  rising  of  1745,  which  draws  Waverley 
into  its  sweep,  has  played  itself  out,  and  the  pale  love- 
story  has  been  tamely  concluded,  the  figure  that  remains 
with  us  as  we  close  the  book  is  that  of  Evan  Dhu,  the 
humble  follower  of  the  Highland  chief  Vich  Ian  Vohr, 
standing  at  the  condemnation  of  his  master,  and  pledging 
himself  and  six  of  the  clan  to  die  in  his  stead.  "If  the 
Saxon  gentlemen  are  laughing,"  he  said,  "because  a  poor 
man,  such  as  me,  thinks  my  life  or  the  life  of  six  of  my 
degree  is  worth  that  of  Vich  Ian  Vohr,  it's  like  enough 
they  may  be  very  right;  but  if  they  laugh  because  they 
think  I  would  not  keep  my  word,  and  come  back  to  re- 
deem him,  they  ken  neither  the  heart  of  a  Hielandman 
nor  the  honour  of  a  gentleman."  Among  such  types  as 
these  we  look  for  Scott's  greatest  characters:  Edie  Ochil- 
tree  in  The  Antiquary,  Baillie  Jarvie  in  Rob  Roy,  Peter 
Peebles  in  Redgauntlel,  and  many  more  who  stand  out 
from  the  novels  as  complete  and  substantive  figures  in 
which  the  race  of  Scotchmen  has  expressed  itself  forever. 
Only  once,  however,  did  Scott  trust  entirely  to  this  ele- 
ment of  native  strength.  In  The  Heart  of  Midlothian  he 


398  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

dispenses  altogether  with  the  aristocratic  heroine,  throws 
aside  the  conventional  plot,  and  gives  us  instead  the  story 
of  Jeanie  Deans,  one  of  the  most  humanly  moving  to  be 
found  in  all  fie  don. 

It  is,  moreover,  from  local  types  which  he  knew  that 
Scott  derives  his  most  impressive  appeals  to  the  sense  of 
terror  and  mystery,  already  awakened  in  the  reading  pub- 
lic by  the  gothic  romancers.  The  fantastic  figures  which 
start  out  of  the  background,  Madge  Wildfire  in  The  Heart 
of  Midlothian,  Meg  Merrilies  in  Guy  Mannering,  and 
Norna  of  the  Fitful  Head  in  The  Pirate,  constitute  far 
more  powerful  romantic  elements  than  are  afforded  by 
his  rather  timid  use  of  the  supernatural. 

The  material  which  Scott  gained  at  first  hand  from  the 
Scotland  of  his  own  day  he  supplemented  by  a  very  dili- 
gent and  human,  if  somewhat  unscientific, 
antiquarianism.  In  his  childhood  he  de- 
lighted to  hear  of  the  past  from  survivors  of 
it.  Of  his  mother's  conversation  he  wrote:  "If  I  have 
been  able  to  do  anything  in  the  way  of  painting  the  past 
times  it  is  very  much  from  the  studies  with  which  she 
presented  me."  Later  he  drew  on  old  books  and  letters 
to  supply  what  was  lacking  in  personal  tradition.  Such 
intercourse  with  the  past  widened  his  knowledge  of  men, 
and  gave  him  material  for  his  historical  portraits.  It 
also  provided  him  with  many  of  those  incidents  by  means 
of  which  he  gives  to  a  character  or  to  a  scene  its  final 
reality.  Scott  was  often  slipshod  in  putting  his  stories 
together  as  wholes,  but  he  was  consummate  in  his  power 
to  place  his  characters  in  a  picturesquely  significant  set- 
ting, and  to  draw  from  the  interplay  between  his  persons 
and  his  scene  action  so  appropriate  to  the  dramatic  situa- 
tion  that  it  seems  inevitable.  A  remarkable 
incident.  instance  of  this  faculty  occurs  in  Old  Mortal- 
ity, where  Morton  visits  Burley  in  the  cave 
reached  by  a  single  tree  trunk  bridging  the  chasm  of  a 


THE   NOVEL  399 

waterfall.  As  Morton  approaches  he  hears  the  shouts 
and  screams  of  the  old  Covenanter,  in  whom  religious 
fury  has  become  insanity;  and  at  length  he  sees  the  fearful 
figure  of  Burley  in  strife  with  the  fiends  which  beset  him. 
The  effect  of  threatening  scenery  and  of  the  terror  of 
madness  is  brought  to  a  focus,  as  it  were,  at  the  instant 
when  Burley  sends  the  tree  crashing  into  the  abyss,  leav- 
ing Morton  to  jump  for  his  life. 

Scott's  stronghold  was  his  native  land,  in  the  period 
which  he  could  reach  by  fresh  tradition,  that  is,  the  cen- 
tury before  his  birth.  Here  his  historical  por- 
traits are  wonderfully  definite;  and  his  pres-  History!  °f 
entation  of  historical  movements,  like  that 
of  the  Covenanters  or  the  Jacobites,  as  seen  in  the  high 
light  of  individual  experience,  is  full  of  insight  and  imagi- 
nation. As  he  exhausted  this  material,  or  felt  the  need 
of  stimulating  his  audience  with  variety,  he  went  more 
and  more  into  other  fields,  and  relied  more  and  more  on 
formal  history  for  his  material.  In  his  English  and  con- 
tinental novels,  literary  inspiration  and  study  never  quite 
took  the  place  of  what  was  almost  first-hand  knowledge 
in  the  Scotch.  Yet  his  treatment  of  Richard's  crusade 
in  The  Talisman,  or  of  Louis  XI's  struggle  with  Charles 
the  Bold  in  Quentin  Durward,  or  of  Elizabeth's  coquetries 
in  Kenilworth,  testify  to  his  power  of  using  history  to 
give  interest  and  significance  to  his  action  and  characters, 
or,  in  other  words,  of  making  it  contributory  to  the  art 
of  fiction. 

Although  since  Scott's  day  nearly  every  novelist  of 
note  has  attempted  something  in  the  historical  field,  the 
romantic  temper,  which  first  commended  his- 
torical material  to  the  novelist,  gave  place, 
after  Scott's  death,  to  a  different  mood. 
Scott's  romantic  pictures  of  the  feudal  past  were  flatter- 
ing to  a  people  struggling,  as  they  thought,  to  preserve 
the  relics  of  that  past  from  the  engulfing  revolution.  But 


400  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

after  the  immediate  effect  of  the  Napoleonic  War  had 
passed  away,  new  ideas  began  to  make  progress  in  Eng- 
land, broadening  the  current  of  English  thought  and  life. 
This  broadening  is  reflected  in  the  work  of  two  writers 
whose  productions  cover  chronologically  the  middle  period 
of  the  century,  Benjamin  Disraeli  (1804-1881)  and  Ed- 
ward Bulwer-Lytton  (1803-1873).  Disraeli  began  his 
career  with  the  publication  of  Vivian  Grey  (1826),  in  which 
a  new  type  of  hero  is  presented,  the  man  of  the  world — 
a  sign  that  the  sinister,  romantic  rebel  of  Byron's  trage- 
dies had  had  his  day.  He  continued  to  write  novels  of 
politics  in  which  his  own  ambition  is  reflected,  and  his 
later  political  programme  is  expounded,  such  as  Coningsby 
(1844)  and  Sybil  (1845).  Even  after  he  was  leader  of 
the  Conservative  party  and  Prime  Minister  he  used  his 
leisure,  when  out  of  office,  to  write  Lothair  (1870),  in 
which  the  effect  of  the  Oxford  Movement  and  the  Catho- 
lic Reaction  on  English  society  is  discussed,  and  Endym- 
ion  (1881).  ^With  a  large  mixture  of  conventional  ro- 
mantic material,  his  novels  contain  social  criticism  of 
value  and  throw  light  on  the  political  thought  of  the 
time. 

Edward  Bulwer,  Lord  Lytton,  was,  like  Disraeli,  a 
political  and  diplomatic  figure.  Like  him  he  made  early 
in  his  career  a  direct  attack  on  Byronism.  In 
Pelha™,  ^e  Adventures  of  a  Gentleman  (1828), 
Lytton.  the  hero  is  a  young  dandy,  who  learns  worldly 
wisdom  from  a  Chesterfieldian  mother,  and 
who,  armed  with  unlimited  conceit  and  self-possession, 
brings  the  world  to  his  feet.  According  to  Bulwer 's 
view,  society  is  too  easily  conquered  to  make  rebellion 
worth  while;  and  the  success  of  his  book  proved  him 
right. 

Bulwer's  first  novels  illustrate  the  later  development  of 
the  sensationalism  which  had  manifested  itself  in  fiction 
at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  as  one  symptom  of 


THE   NOVEL  4OI 

f 

the  romantic  revival.  In  many  of  his  novels,  notably 
in  Pelham  and  in  Lucretia  (1846),  he  plays  upon  his  read- 
er's sense  of  the  terrible,  by  his  pictures  of 
criminal  life.  But  he  infuses  these  pictures 
with  a  definite  purpose,  treating  his  out- 
laws as  victims  of  society.  Paul  Clifford  (1830),  for  ex- 
ample, of  which  the  hero  is  a  highwayman,  was  written 
"  to  draw  attention  to  two  errors  in  our  penal  institu- 
tions, viz.: — a  vicious  prison  discipline  and  a  sanguinary 
penal  code."  The  other  sensational  element  in  Bulwer's 
work  is  a  pseudoscientific  use  of  the  supernatural,  of  which 
Zanoni  (1845)  furnishes  the  most  elaborate  example. 

Naturally,  with  the  success  of  Scott  before  him,  Bulwer 
essayed  the  historical  novel.  In  1834,  after  elaborate 
preparation,  he  published  The  Last  Days  of 
Pompeii,  and  later  Rienzi  (1835),  The  Last  of 
the  Barons  (1843),  and  Harold  (1848).  In  all 
of  these  he  tried,  much  more  consciously  than  Scott,  to 
make  the  novel  serve  the  purpose  of  the  historian.  Under 
the  impulse  of  Thackeray's  success  Bulwer  turned  to 
modern  life  in  The  Caxtons  (1849)  and  My  Novel  (1853). 
His  realism  is  relieved,  however,  by  the  in- 
troduction of  ideal  characters,  which  he 
touches  with  whimsical  quality  in  the  man- 
ner of  Sterne,  perhaps  realizing  that  goodness  is  rendered 
more  convincing  by  being  made  a  trifle  absurd.  Alto- 
gether, with  due  deduction  for  the  affected,  the  sensa- 
tional, and  the  sentimental  in  Bulwer's  novels,  the  fact  re- 
mains that  his  versatility  and  his  long-continued  energy 
make  him  a  useful  sign  of  the  shifting  literary  currents 
during  the  middle  years  of  the  century. 

Charles  Dickens  (1812-1870)  must  always  be  one  of  the 
most  striking  figures  in  the  history  of  English 
literature,  on  account  of  the  dramatic  nature 
of  his  success.     He  started  from  the  humblest 
position  in  life;   when  he  was  ten  years  old  he  was  at 


402  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

work  in  a  blacking  .warehouse,  sleeping  beneath  a  counter, 
and  spending  his  Sundays  with  his  family  in  Marshalsea 
Prison,  where  his  father  was  confined  for  debt.  Yet  be- 
fore he  was  thirty  he  was  a  great  writer;  and  before  he 
was  forty,  a  notable  public  man.  No  writer  in  English 
ever  gathered  with  a  fuller  hand  the  rewards  of  the  liter- 
ary calling.  It  is  true,  other  writers  have  made  more 
money,  or  have  won  knighthood  or  the  peerage;  but  none 
has  had  in  his  lifetime  so  wide  and  intensely  loyal  a  per- 
sonal following;  none  has  had  in  addition  to  money, 
friends,  and  fame,  the  peculiar  tribute  which  came  to 
Dickens  from  vast  audiences  gathered  together,  not  once 
or  twice,  but  hundreds  of  times,  in  scores  of  cities,  to 
testify  by  "roaring  seas  of  applause"  to  his  personal  tri- 
umph. In  middle  life  Dickens  began  to  give  semidra- 
matic  public  readings  from  his  works,  and  these  grew  to 
be  his  chief  interest.  The  strain  and  excitement  wore 
him  out.  It  is  a  circumstance  perhaps  as  tragic  in  its 
way  as  that  which  shadows  the  close  of  Scott's  life,  that 
this  personal  triumph  was  the  direct  cause  of  Dickens's 
death.  Scott  died,  broken  by  the  effort  to  retrieve  by 
literature  the  effects  of  failure  in  life.  Dickens  died  forty 
years  later,  worn  out  by  the  effort  to  gather  in  life  the 
rewards  of  literature. 

Dickens's  peculiar  triumph  calls  attention  to  the  prime 
fact  in  his  authorship,  his  nearness  to  his  public.  He 
'  His  Training.  be§an  ^s  career  as  a  reporter,  the  literary 
calling  which  is  most  immediately  of  the 
people.  He  was  later  an  editor  of  magazines,  and  even, 
for  a  short  time,  of  a  great  daily  newspaper.  But  though 
necessity  made  him  a  journalist,  he  wished  to  be  an  actor. 
As  a  young  man  he  tried  to  get  a  position  at  Covent  Gar- 
den Theatre.  For  years  he  was  the  leading  spirit  in  a 
famous  company  of  amateurs  who  played  in  various 
cities  of  England;  and  as  we  have  seen,  his  chief  interest 
came  to  be  his  readings.  These  two  professional  instincts 


THE   NOVEL  403 

account  for  much  in  Dickens's  work.  As  a  reporter  and 
as  an  editor  he  studied  his  public;  as  an  actor  he  taught 
himself  to  play  upon  it,  through  his  writings  and  his  dra- 
matic readings  from  them,  with  incomparable  skill. 

It  was  while  Dickens,  then  about  twenty,  was  a  re- 
porter that  he  began  to  write  sketches  of  London  life  for 
various  newspapers.  From  his  success  with 
these  came,  in  1836,  an  engagement  to  write 
the  letterpress  for  a  series  of  cartoons  repre- 
senting the  humors  of  sporting  life.  For  this  purpose  he 
invented  the  "Pickwick  Club,"  which  at  once  made  a 
popular  hit.  The  death  of  the  artist  who  was  engaged 
upon  the  drawings  left  Dickens  free  to  widen  the  scope 
of  the  adventures  of  the  club,  and  to  add  other  characters 
without  stint.  The  complete  result  was  a  great  book, 
formless  as  to  plot,  crowded  with  humorous  figures. 
These  figures  are  given  with  broadly  exaggerated  traits, 
as  if  Dickens  had  always  in  mind  the  cartoon  which  was 
to  accompany  the  text.  They  talk  freely,  not  to  say  in- 
exhaustibly, and  all  differently.  But  the  author's  chief 
resource  is  his  faculty  for  bringing  his  caricatures  into 
contact  with  the  actual  world,  in  situations  that  expose 
their  oddities  in  high  relief.  Mr.  Tupman  as  a  lover,  Mr. 
Winkle  as  a  duellist  or  a  sportsman,  Mr.  Pickwick  in  a 
breach- of-promise  suit  with  the  Widow  Bardell,  the  Pick- 
wick Club  contending  with  a  recalcitrant  horse,  the  Rev- 
erend Mr.  Stiggins  drunk  at  a  temperance  meeting — these 
incongruities  are  narrated  in  a  style  always  copious,  but 
rapid  and  piquant. 

In  his  later  novels  Dickens  improved  on  his  first  at- 
tempts. He  continued  to  be  a  caricaturist,  to  rely  on 
distortions  and  exaggerations  of  feature  or 

His  Humors. 

manner;    but    his    range    of    effects    became 
broader,  and  his  figures  more  significant.     Micawber,  in 
David  Copperfield  (1850),  "waiting  for  something  to  turn 
up,"  Sairy  Gamp,  in  Martin  Ckuzzlewit  (1845),  haunted 


404  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

by  the  mythical  Mrs.  Harris,  'umble  Uriah  Heap,  sancti- 
monious Pecksniff,  cheerful  Mark  Tapley,  all  have  dis- 
tinct individuality,  yet  all  label  so  conveniently  common 
attitudes  and  habits  of  mind  that  we  use  their  names 
freely  as  categories. 

In  Pickwick  Papers  Dickens  is  purely  a  humorist;  in 
the  novels  which  followed  he  enlarged  enormously  the 
sources  of  his  power  over  his  audience.     By 

the  use  of  the  same  method  which  he  had 
employed  in  his  humors,  he  created  figures 
of  a  different  sort,  to  excite  not  laughter  but  loathing  and 
terror.  In  the  portrayal  of  these  types  also  he  gained 
subtlety  with  practice.  Fagin  and  Sykes  in  Oliver  Twist 
(1838),  Quilp,  the  dwarf,  in  Old  Curiosity  Shop  (1841), 
are  examples  of  rather  crude  methods  of  exciting  physical 
horror;  monstrous  as  they  are,  they  do  not  haunt  the 
reader  with  the  terrible  suggestion  of  inhumanity  that 
lurks  behind  the  placid,  smiling  face  of  Mme.  Defarge  in 
A  Tale  of  Two  Cities  (1859),  ^  sne  s^s  in  front  of  the 
guillotine,  knitting,  and  counting  the  heads  as  they  fall. 
In  the  stories  just  mentioned  Dickens  showed  again  his 
fertility  in  inventing  situations,  using  his  histrionic  power 
as  freely  in  melodrama  as  in  farce.  The  behavior  of 
Fagin  at  his  trial  and  in  prison  is  the  conception  of  an 
actor,  careful  to  make  every  gesture,  every  expression, 
tell  on  his  audience. 

A  third  type  of  character  which  Dickens  developed, 
and  which  in  his  time  made  immensely  for  his  popularity, 

HisHu  •  WES  t^iat  °^  t^le  v*ctmi  °f  s°ciety — usually  a 
tarianisJo!"11"  child.  The  possibilities  of  childhood  for  ro- 
mance or  pathos  had  been  suggested  by 
Shakespeare,  by  Fielding,  and  by  Blake;  but  none  of  these 
had  brought  children  into  the  very  centre  of  the  action, 
or^had  made  them  highly  individual.  In  his  second  novel 
Dickens  made  his  story  centre  about  a  child,  Oliver  Twist, 
and  from  that  time  forth  children  were  expected  and  nee- 


THE   NOVEL  405 

essary  characters  in  his  novels.  Little  Nell,  Florence 
Dombey,  David  Copperfield,  stand  out  in  celestial  inno- 
cence and  goodness,  in  contrast  with  the  evil  creatures 
whose  persecution  they  suffer  for  a  season.  And  further, 
they  represent  in  most  telling  form  the  complaint  of  the 
individual  against  society.  For  with  Dickens  the  private 
cruelty  which  his  malign  characters  inflict  is  almost  al- 
ways connected  with  social  wrong.  Bumble's  savage 
blow  at  Oliver  Twist  asking  for  more  food,  Squeers's 
wicked  exploitation  of  his  pupils  in  Nicholas  Nickleby 
(1839),  are  carried  back  and  laid  at  the  door  of  society. 
The  championship  of  the  individual  against  institutions, 
which  had  been  a  leading  motive  in  later  eighteenth-cen- 
tury fiction,  had  been  checked  by  the  reaction  against 
the  French  Revolution;  but  in  Dickens's  day  the  "redress 
of  wrongs"  had  become  again  a  great  public  movement. 
The  workings  of  later  romanticism  had  begun  to  be  re- 
flected in  a  popular  distrust  of  governmental  methods, 
a  kind  of  sentimental  hatred  of  organized  authority.  To 
this  feeling  Dickens  constantly  appealed.  In  nearly  all 
his  books  there  is  a  definite  attack  upon  some  legal  or 
social  evil:  in  Oliver  Twist  upon  the  workhouse;  in  Bleak 
House  (1853)  upon  the  chancery  courts;  in  Little  Dorrit 
(1857)  upon  imprisonment  for  debt.  Undoubtedly  there 
was  something  theatrical  in  Dickens's  adoption  of  social 
wrong  as  a  motive  in  fiction,  but  there  was  also  much 
that  was  sincere.  He  had  himself  known  the  lot  of  the 
persecuted;  at  the  root  of  his  zeal  for  reform  was  the 
memory  of  his  own  bitter  childhood. 

The  types  of  character  already  discussed  were  sufficient 
to  sustain  the  movement  of  Dickens's  earlier  books. 
These  were  usually  simple  in  structure.  His  ffis  pkjts 
favorite  authors  were  Smollett  and  LeSage, 
and  he  seems  to  have  been  disposed  to  build  his  own 
novels  like  theirs,  on  the  picaresque  plan.  In  most  of 
them  we  begin  with  the  hero  in  childhood,  and  follow  his 


400  A   HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

personal  adventures  into  the  thick  of  a  plot  involving  the 
popular  romantic  material  of  the  day,  kidnapping,  mur- 
der, mob-justice,  and  other  incidents  of  criminal  life. 
When  the  author  needs  the  usual  characters  of  the  novel, 
a  pair  of  conventional  love-makers,  for  example,  he  gives 
us  figures  as  weak  and  unnatural  as  were  many  of  Scott's 
titular  heroes.  In  his  later  books,  however,  he  gained 
the  power  of  constructing  elaborate  plots,  and  of  creating 
characters  of  heroic  dignity  and  tragic  intensity,  such  as 
Sidney  Carton  in  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  and  Lady  Ded- 
lock  in  Bleak  House.  These  are  the  most  enduringly 
powerful  of  his  novels,  but  they  are  not  those  upon  which 
his  fame  rests.  Dickens  is  remembered  not  as  a  dramatic 
artist  in  the  novel  form,  but  as  a  showman  of  wonderful 
resources.  .  He  is  master  of  a  vast  and  fascinating  stage, 
crowded  with  farcical  characters;  with  grotesque  and  ter- 
rible creatures,  more  devils  than  men;  and  with  the 
touching  forms  of  little  children.  The  action  is  some- 
times merry,  sometimes  exciting,  sometimes  pathetic. 
We  have  laughter,  and  horror,  and  tears;  but  the  prevail- 
ing atmosphere  is  one  of  cheerfulness,  as  befits  a  great 
Christmas  pantomime. 

Dickens  and  Bulwer  have  in  common  their  frequent 
use  of  sensational  material,  then-  tendency  to  seek  literary 

effects  of  the  sentimental  kind,  and  their  dis- 
MakSLice  Position  to  regard  the  novel  seriously  as  a 
Thackeray.  social  engine.  A  vigorous  reaction  against  all 

this  was  led  by  William  Makepeace  Thackeray 
(1811-1863).  Thackeray  was  an  Anglo-Indian,  born  in 
Calcutta.  After  a  short  career  at  Cambridge,  and  some 
desultory  art  study,  he  turned  to  literature.  His  first 
work  consisted  of  light  essays,  sketches  of  travel,  and 
burlesques,  in  which  the  weaknesses  of  the  romantic 
school  are  cleverly  hit  off  in  imitations  of  Scott,  Bulwer, 
and  Disraeli.  His  first  long  story,  Catherine  (1839),  is 
the  picture  of  a  female  rogue,  drawn  on  the  picaresque 


THE   NOVEL  407 

plan  with  unsympathetic  realism,  and  intended  as  an 
antidote  to  the  sentimental  treatment  of  criminals  as  ex- 
emplified by  Bulwer's  Clifford,  and  Dickens's  Nancy  in 
Oliver  Twist.  Barry  Lyndon  (1844)  is  likewise  a  pica- 
resque story,  being  a  brilliant  account  of  the  exploits  of 
an  eighteenth-century  adventurer. 

Thackeray  gave  his  realistic  theories  larger  scope  in 
Vanity  Fair,  written  between  1846  and  1848.  This,  like 
most  of  his  succeeding  novels,  he  published  in 
parts,  seldom  supplying  the  matter  for  the  The  structure 
forthcoming  chapter  until  the  last  possible  Novels, 
moment.  Naturally,  the  story  is  not  a  model 
of  structure  in  the  narrow  technical  sense;  but  it  may  be 
said  that  this  rather  loose  method  of  working  suited  not 
only  Thackeray's  temperament  but  also  his  artistic  prob- 
lem. For  Thackeray's  realism  is  that  of  the  observer, 
not  that  of  the  analyst.  He  never  isolates  a  single  case 
and  studies  it  with  long,  close  patience.  On  the  con- 
trary, he  sees  life  with  the  large  vision  of  a  man  of  the 
world.  To  have  confined  his  multitude  of  characters 
within  the  limits  of  what  is  technically  called  a  plot, 
would  have  introduced  an  element  of  unreality  into  his 
book.  The  action  of  Vanity  Fair  revolves  about  the 
heroines,  Amelia  Sedley  and  Becky  Sharp.  The  two 
women  in  their  opposition  are  admirable  foils;  Amelia 
mild  and  incapable — a  parasite,  the  author  calls  her — 
living  on  the  chivalrous  protection  of  Dobbin;  Becky, 
keen  and  competent,  making  her  world  for  herself,  levy- 
ing tribute  on  every  man  who  crosses  her  path.  The  two 
stories  begin  together,  and  Thackeray  supplies  a  link  be- 
tween them  later  in  Jos  Sedley;  but  in  the  end  he  gives 
over  the  attempt  to  unite  them,  and  lets  the  two  sets  of 
characters  diverge  in  his  novel  as  they  must  have  done 
in  life. 

Again,  Thackeray's  training  was  that  of  the  essayist, 
and,  like  Fielding,  he  uses  his  story  as  a  support  for  com- 


408        A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ment  on  human  life  and  nature.     In  Vanity  Fair  he  in- 
troduces his  characters  as  puppets  whom  he  as  showman 

can  manipulate  as  he  pleases  to  illustrate  his 
His  Attitude  views.  The  sceptical  persiflage  with  which 
World!*  t  he  treats  his  characters  indicates  his  attitude 

toward  the  world  which  he  pictures.  In  the 
metaphor  of  the  puppets  lurks  a  gleam  of  the  satire  which 
Swift  showed  in  his  sketch  of  society  as  Lilliput.  The 
title,  too,  Vanity  Fair — Bunyan's  fair,  "where  is  sold  all 
sorts  of  vanity,  and  where  is  to  be  seen  juggling,  cheats, 
games,  plays,  fools,  apes,  knaves,  rogues,  and  that  of 
every  kind" — suggests  something  of  contempt  if  not  of 
bitterness.  The  roguishness  and  weakness  of  Thack- 
eray's puppets  has  long  been  a  ground  for  calling  their 
showman  a  cynic;  but  Thackeray's  cynicism  is  strongly 
tempered  with  tolerance  and  with  pity.  Dickens  draws 
his  pathos  from  the  spectacle  of  ideal  innocence  exposed 
to  the  evils  of  the  world;  but  Thackeray  makes  no  less 
pitiful  the  sorrows  of  men  and  women  who  are  themselves 
sinful,  weak,  and  stupid.  Becky's  husband,  Rawdon 
Crawley,  is  not  an  admirable  figure,  yet  we  are  sorry  for 
him.  George  and  Amelia  are  both  in  their  way  con- 
temptible, yet  the  scene  of  their  parting  is  wringing  with 
tenderness.  Thackeray  is  merciful  toward  the  feeble, 
flawed  souls  that  he  portrays,  because  gentleness  was  a 
part  of  his  nature.  Disillusioned  as  to  most  of  the  pre- 
tentious virtues  of  the  world,  he  still  believed  in  kindness, 
in  the  instinctive  goodness  of  one  being  toward  another, 
and  he  exemplified  this  belief  in  his  books  as  in  his  life. 

The  success  of  Vanity  Fair  showed  Thackeray  where 
his  true  power  lay,  and  he  lost  no  time  in  beginning  a 
4i  pendennis.»  second  novel  to  appear  in  numbers,  Pendennis. 

Its  appearance  was  interrupted  by  Thack- 
eray's illness,  however,  and  the  book  was  not  completed 
until  the  end  of  1850.  In  Pendennis,  as  in  Vanity  Fair, 
Thackeray  is  the  moralist,  but  of  a  sterner  sort.  Instead 


THE   NOVEL  409 

of  the  figure  of  the  puppet  booth,  he  chooses  that  of  the 
morality  play,  representing  his  hero  as  passing  through 
a  series  of  temptations  from  the  world,  the  flesh,  and  the 
devil,  each  of  which  constitutes  an  episode  in  the  book, 
and  as  finally  saved  by  the  influence  of  two  good  women, 
his  mother  and  Laura.  Thackeray  is  entirely  on  their 
side,  and  yet  he  does  not  hesitate  to  show  us  the  limita- 
tions of  their  virtue,  in  their  suspicion  and  cruelty  toward 
Fanny  Bolton;  and  Fanny,  pathetic  in  her  renunciation, 
is  also  contemptible  in  the  ease  with  which  she  consoles 
herself  for  it.  Pendennis  himself,  though  saved  from  the 
worst  consequences  of  each  temptation,  is  no  less  ready 
to  fall  into  the  next;  and  the  best  example  of  moral  cour- 
age is  given  by  the  old  worldling,  Major  Pendennis.  Of 
such  mixed  materials  is  human  nature  and  the  moral  life 
made. 

The  importance  of  the  historical  element  in  fiction  after 
Scott  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  even  the  petty  world  of 
Vanity  Fair  is  disturbed  by  a  great  national 
crisis;  but  Thackeray,  instead  of  using  Water- 
loo  to  impose  dignity  and  splendor  upon  his 
story,  characteristically  gives  us  a  "back-stairs"  view  of 
war.  We  follow  the  battle,  not  in  the  thought  of  Napo- 
leon or  the  Duke,  but  chiefly  as  it  is  reflected  in  the  fears 
of  the  wretched  Jos  Sedley,  in  the  hopes  of  his  servant 
Isidore,  and  in  the  calculations  of  Becky  Sharp; — chiefly, 
but  not  wholly:  for  there  is  poor,  almost  abandoned 
Amelia  "praying  for  George,  who  was  lying  on  his  face, 
dead,  with  a  bullet  through  his  heart."'  Thackeray  is  in- 
terested in  famous  events  and  persons  because  of  the 
light  which  they  throw  upon  the  common  affairs  of  men. 
Even  in  his  historical  novels  he  is  a  realist,  seeking  to 
recall  the  world  of  the  eighteenth  century,  not  in  distant 
splendor,  but  in  the  actual  forms  in  which  it  realized  itself 
to  a  contemporary.  In  Henry  Esmond  (1852),  however, 
as  in  Vanity  Fair,  Thackeray's  own  temperament  is  to  be 


4 10  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

reckoned  with.  His  sympathy  with  the  preceding  cen- 
tury gives  to  his  treatment  of  it  a  warmth  and  brilliancy 
which  makes  the  most  realistic  of  historical  novels  also 
the  most  poetic. 

In  Henry  Esmond  we  follow  the  hero's  childhood  at 
Castlewood,  in  the  mysterious  atmosphere  of  plotting 
Papists;  and  his  youth  in  the  London  of  Queen 
Anne,  where  the  persons  and  names  of  Addison, 
Steele,  Prior,  Swift,  Fielding,  Atterbury,  meet 
us  as  casually  as  those  of  celebrities  today.  We  see 
him  take  part  in  the  wonderful  victories  of  Marlborough, 
and  in  the  daring  game  which  the  Pretender  played  for 
his  crown.  The  vanished  world  lives  for  us  in  character 
and  in  episode;  lives  with  a  dignity  and  richness  of 
conception  and  style  which  show  Thackeray  to  have 
been,  when  he  chose,  the  greatest  artist  among  the 
English  novelists.  In  his  masterpiece  he  is  writing,  not 
as  a  careless,  rather  lazy  master  of  a  puppet-show, 
but  in  the  person  of  the  chivalrous  Esmond.  Every 
incident  and  description,  then,  must  reflect  his  hero's 
character  in  some  touch  of  nobility  or  of  charm.  In 
Esmond's  repulsion  from  Marlborough,  in  his  devotion 
to  Castlewood  and  his  son,  in  his  passion  for  Beatrix,  and 
in  his  love  for  Lady  Castlewood,  there  is  the  constant 
revelation  of  an  honorable  and  loyal  man.  When  he  is 
telling  us  of  the  quarrel  between  Marlborough  and  Webb, 
there  is  that  in  their  manner  which  reminds  us  that  it  is 
a  gentleman's  story.  When  he  surrenders  his  birthright, 
property,  and  name,  he  bears  himself  with  a  simplicity 
and  a  modesty  which  are  in  keeping  with  a  great  renunci- 
ation. The  style  itself,  marvellous  in  its  technical  ap- 
proximation to  the  manner  of  the  period  described,  is  yet 
more  wonderful  in  its  reflection  of  Esmond's  personality. 
When  he  leaves  Castlewood  or  stands  at  his  mother's 
grave,  when  he  bends  beside  the  body  of  his  dear  lord, 
run  through  by  the  villain  Mohun,  always  his  utterance 


THE  NOVEL  411 

is  perfect  in  its  intimacy,  its  simplicity,  its  distant,  haunt- 
ing rhythm.  Even  in  a.  detail  of  the  picture  of  Lady 
Castlewood  vanishing  from  Esmond's  sight  in  anger, 
Thackeray's  distinction  is  evident.  "He  saw  her  re- 
treating, the  taper  lighting  up  her  marble  face,  her  scarlet 
lip  quivering,  and  her  shining  golden  hair." 

Thackeray's  three  later  novels  follow  the  lines  of  his 
earlier  three.  The  Newcomes  (1853-1855)  is,  like  Vanity 
Fair,  a  large  canvas  of  London  society,  and  quite  as  suc- 
cessful, containing  the  most  delightful  of  his  heroines  in 
Ethel  Newcome,  and  the  most  winning  mixture  of  human 
weakness  and  chivalry  in  Colonel  Newcome.  The  Vir- 
ginians (1857-1859)  is  a  sequel  to  Henry  Esmond,  and 
The  Adventures  of  Philip  (1861-1862)  a  diluted  Pen- 
dennis. 

In  his  return  to  realism  Thackeray  found  an  industrious 
follower  in  Anthony  Trollope  (1815-1882).  The  latter 
adopted  his  master's  flippant  view  of  the 
novel  expressed  in  Vanity  Fair,  but,  unlike  Trollope 
Thackeray,  he  never  succeeded  as  an  artist  in 
rising  above  it.  A  novel  should  be  written,  he  says 
frankly,  to  amuse  young  people  of  both  sexes,  and  there 
should  be  nothing  too  unpleasant  in  it;  at  least,  he 
promises  the  reader  that  he  will  never  let  such  a  thing 
happen  in  a  novel  of  his.  Trollope's  fame  began  with  a 
series  of  novels  dealing  with  the  life  among  the  clergy 
of  a  cathedral  city.  The  Warden  (1855),  the  first  of 
these,  was  followed  by  Barchester  Towers  (1857) — gen~ 
erally  considered  his  masterpiece — by  Framley  Parsonage 
(1861),  and  by  The  Last  Chronicle  of  Bar  set  (1867).  He 
also  developed  a  series  of  political  novels,  and  treated 
various  aspects  of  English  commercial  and  country  life. 
In  his  wide  survey  of  social  conditions  in  the  middle  and 
upper  classes  of  England,  he  comes  nearer  than  any  other 
English  novelist  to  fulfilling  the  vast  programmes  of  the 
French  realists,  Balzac  and  Zola.  Trollope  was  a  man 


412  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  great  industry,  in  every  sense  a  professional  novelist, 
writing  a  daily  allowance,  and  often  keeping  two  or  three 
novels  going  at  once.  Much  of  his  work  is  perfunctory, 
but  at  his  best  he  has  a  power  of  creating  figures  which 
have  an  astonishing  air  of  life.  Of  these  Mrs.  Proudie, 
the  bishop's  wife,  who  rages  through  3everal  books,  is  the 
most  notable. 

As  Trollope  may  be  called  a  satellite  of  Thackeray, 
so  Charles  Reade  (1814-1884)  in  a  sense  shines  with  the 
reflected  light  of  Dickens.  Like  Dickens,  Reade 
nad  the  temperament  of  a  romanticist;  but  be- 
ginning his  career  at  a  time  when  realism  was 
the  literary  shibboleth,  he  made  it  his  effort  not  only 
to  discover  the  romantic  elements  in  real  life  and  to 
treat  them  in  the  romantic  manner,  but  also  to  satisfy 
himself  and  his  readers  of  their  truth  by  elaborate  docu- 
mentary evidence.  Reade  had  an  immense  fondness  for 
the  stage,  chiefly,  perhaps,  because  in  the  actor's  life  he 
found  the  romance  which  he  was  always  seeking.  He 
wrote  numerous  plays;  and  one  of  his  best-known  stories, 
Peg  Wqffington  (1852),  is  a  story  of  stage  life.  His  serious 
discipleship  of  Dickens  appears  in  his  novels  with  purpose. 
Put  Yourself  in  His  Place  (1870)  is  a  story  designed  to 
reflect  the  wrongs  which  trades-unions  inflicted  upon  the 
individual  workman.  In  A  Terrible  Temptation  (1871) 
he  introduces  a  representative  of  himself,  a  novelist, 
a  student  of  modern  social  conditions,  to  whom  the 
oppressed  have  recourse,  and  who  uses  his  power  to 
enlist  public  sympathy  in  their  behalf  and  to  overawe 
the  oppressor.  Reade 's  masterpiece  is  TJie  Cloister  and 
the  Hearth  (1861),  a  novel  of  the  period  of  the  Renais- 
sance, with  the  father  of  the  great  Erasmus  as  its  hero. 
To  the  construction  of  this  work  Reade  brought  his  labo- 
rious method  of  getting  up  his  facts,  but  in  spite  of  its 
learning  the  book  is  one  of  the  three  or  four  best  historical 
novels  since  Scott. 


THE   NOVEL  413 

Thackeray  as  a  realist  and  moralist  had  an  earnest 
sympathizer  in  a  writer  who  was  by  circumstances  a 
romanticist.  Charlotte  Bronte  (1816-1855) 
grew  up  in  the  Yorkshire  parsonage  of  her 
father,  with  such  experience  as  came  from  coun- 
try boarding-schools,  a  year  in  Brussels,  and  her  own 
family  life  with  its  terrible  succession  of  tragedies — the 
death  of  her  mother,  the  blindness  of  her  father,  the 
death  of  her  sisters,  and  the  ruin  of  her  brother  through 
dissipation.  She  and  her  sisters  wrote  for  their  own 
amusement,  inventing  scenes  and  characters  to  supple- 
ment the  melancholy  resources  of  the  life  that  they  knew. 
This  perfectly  natural  romanticism  led  Emily  Bronte  to 
write  one  of  the  most  strangely  powerful  of  all  novels, 
Wuthering  Heights  (1847),  in  which  the  hero  and  heroine 
love  and  torture  each  other  in  a  world  of  their  own, 
remote  from  the  real  world,  both  social  and  psychological. 

In  Charlotte  Bronte  the  imagination  never  attained  to 
such  tragic  splendor  as  in  her  sister;  her  novels  are,  how- 
ever, more  nearly  in  contact  with  actual  life.  „  „ 
The  first  of  them,  Jane  Eyre  (1847),  °Pens 
with  a  transcript  from  Miss  Bronte's  own  life  at  boarding- 
school,  but  the  heroine  soon  passes  beyond  the  world  of 
the  author's  experience  into  the  romantic  realm  of  her 
longing  and  imagination.  Undoubtedly,  there  is  much 
that  is  second-rate  in  the  story.  The  hero  of  Jane's 
adoration,  Rochester,  is  an  impossible  character.  His 
mad  wife  is  a  literary  inheritance  from  Mrs.  Radcliffe. 
The  incidents  reveal  almost  pathetically  Miss  Bronte's 
ignorance  of  life  and  her  lack  of  power  to  measure  prob- 
ability. But  the  heroine  is  a  genuine  woman.  Psycho- 
logically she  is  a  study  of  the  author's  inner  life,  and  her 
romantic'  experience  is  symbolical  of  the  attempt  which 
Charlotte  and  her  sisters  made  to  enlarge  and  color  their 
oppressive  little  world  with  the  spaces  and  splendors  of 
the  imagination. 


414  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

It  was  the  honesty  of  Miss  Bronte's  romanticism  that 
made  Jane  Eyre  successful  both  with  the  critics  and  with 
the  public.  Under  the  advice  of  the  critics, 
Miss  Bronte'  abandoned  gothic  machinery  in 
her  later  books,  Shirley  (1849)  and  Villette 
(1853),  and  fell  back  on  the  material  of  her  own  life  in 
Yorkshire  and  in  Brussels.  Nevertheless,  these  books 
bear  constant  witness  to  the  lack  of  harmony  between 
her  artistic  purpose  and  the  means  which  her  experience 
afforded  her  of  carrying  out  this  purpose  with  success. 
For  while  her  experience  in  life  was  limited,  and  constantly 
tended  to  throw  her  back  on  romantic  invention,  she  was 
in  purpose  a  realist,  bent  on  dealing  with  things  as  they 
are,  and  on  making  them  better.  She  dedicated  Jane 
Eyre  to  Thackeray,  in  terms  which  show  the  moral  energy 
which  she  possessed.  Unluckily  her  life  did  not  bring 
her  into  contact  with  large  projects  of  reform.  As  a 
moralist  and  as  an  artist  it  was  her  fortune  to  deal,  in 
spite  of  all  her  efforts  to  the  contrary,  with  the  petty  or 
the  unreal. 

In  one  direction  Miss  Bronte's  experience  was  adequate 
— in  her  contact  with  nature.  From  her  books  one  comes 
to  know  how  largely  in  her  life  the  clouds, 
the  ragged  hills,  the  wide  spaces  of  the  York- 
shire moors  under  sunset  or  moonlight,  made 
up  for  the  inadequacy  of  human  society  and  interests. 
It  is  true,  she  has  the  gothic  trick  of  creating  a  sympa- 
thetic background  to  set  off  the  incidents,  but  in  a  deeper 
fashion  than  this  she  makes  nature  enter  into  the  warp 
and  woof  of  her  stories  through  the  part  which  it  plays 
in  the  most  essential  element  in  them,  the  inner  life  of  her 
heroines. 

Charles  Kingsley  (1819-1875)  shared  Miss  Bronte's 
serious  view  of  fiction;  and  his  position  in  the  world  was 
such  as  to  connect  him  with  large  issues.  He  was  a  cler- 
gyman, professor  of  history  at  Cambridge,  a  leader  in  the 


THE  NOVEL  415 

"Broad  Church"  movement,  the  friend  of  Tennyson,  and 
Carlyle,  of  whose  strenuous  philosophy  of  life  he  was  a 
sort  of  popular  exponent.  In  his  earlier  novels, 
Yeast  (1848)  and  Alton  Locke  (1850),  Kings- 
ley  gives  a  view  of  the  problems  which  per- 
plexed men's  minds  in  the  middle  years  of  the  century, 
the  years  of  the  Catholic  revival  and  of  Chartism;  and 
he  tries  to  point  out  a  middle  course  between  Catholi- 
cism and  scepticism  in  religion,  between  Toryism  and 
revolution  in  politics.  Unfortunately,  he  was  a  disciple 
of  Bulwer  in  his  mingling  of  romance  with  realism,  and 
his  incidents,  though  dramatic,  are  often  childishly  un- 
convincing. 

In  his  later  work  he  carries  his  purpose  into  the  his- 
torical novel.  Hypatia  (1853)  is  a- study  of  the  struggle 
between  Christianity  and  paganism,  in  Alexandria,  dur- 
ing the  fifth  century.  Westward  Ho  (1855)  is  a  vigorous 
story  of  the  times  of  Elizabeth,  depicting  the  English 
contest  with  Spain  by  sea  and  in  America.  In  both 
Kingsley  makes  a  didactic  use  of  the  historical  novel, 
presenting  to  his  countrymen  "New  foes  with  old  faces," 
and  seeking  to  develop  his  ideal  of  Christian  manhood, 
a  compound  of  physical  energy  and  intellectual  modera- 
tion to  which  he  felt  in  some  way  that  the  Catholic 
Church  was  dangerous.  His  last  story,  Hereward  the 
Wake  (1866),  illustrates  the  use  of  the  historical  novel  to 
stimulate  national  consciousness.  It  is  an  account  of 
the  life  of  the  last  great  English  rebel  against  the  Norman 
conqueror,  and  is  a  contribution  to  the  rising  tide  of 
national  feeling  .which  expressed  itself  in  emphasis  upon 
the  Anglo-Saxon  element  of  the  race. 

The  religious  and  social  problems  of  England  found  a 
less  passionate  exponent  in  Mrs.  Elizabeth  Gaskell  (1810- 
1865),  the  wife  of  a  Unitarian  clergyman  in   ^^  GaskeU 
Manchester.     Her  life  brought  her  into  con- 
tact with  the  industrial  and  social  difficulties  growing  out 


416  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  the  struggle  between  master  and  workman;  and  these 
she  treated  with  great  skill  in  Mary  Barton  (1848)  and 
in  North  and  South  (1855).  In  Cranford  (1853),  her  best- 
known  book,  she  entered  a  different  field,  that  of  real- 
istic observation  developed  in  a  somewhat  fantastic 
setting. 

Kingsley  and  Mrs.  Gaskell  connect  fiction  with  the  in- 
tellectual and  moral  development  of  England,  a  connec- 
tion which  is  emphasized  further  by  the  work 
*  of  Mary  Ann  Evans,  or  George  Eliot.  She 
was  born  in  1819  and  grew  up  in  the  years  when,  under 
the  influence  of  scientific  speculation,  the  English  mind 
was  casting  loose  from  its  theological  moorings.  She  was 
for  a  time  assistant  editor  of  the  Westminster  Review,  the 
organ  of  the  freethinkers;  and  in  this  position  she  met 
John  Stuart  Mill,  Herbert  Spencer,  G.  H.  Lewes,  and 
other  liberals.  With  Lewes  she  formed  a  union,  neces- 
sarily extra  legal,1  but  in  other  respects  a  marriage.  This 
and  her  renunciation  of  formal  Christianity  were  the  two 
important  events  of  her  life,  for  they  placed  her  under 
the  heavy  responsibility  of  counteracting  the  view  held 
by  many  that  freedom  of  thought  was  naturally  accom- 
panied by  moral  laxity.  They  strengthened  her  already 
powerful  ethical  impulse.  In  1857  she  wrote:  "If  I  live 
five  years  longer,  the  positive  result  of  my  existence  on 
the  side  of  truth  and  goodness  will  far  outweigh  the  small 
negative  good  that  would  have  consisted  in  my  not  doing 
anything  to  shock  others." 

Before  this  she  had  begun  to  experiment  with  fiction, 
her  first  story,  "  The  Sad  Fortunes  of  the  Reverend  Amos 
Her  Novels.  Barton>"  appearing  in  Blackwood's  Magazine 
in  1856.  She  added  to  this  story  two  others 
of  moderate  length,  and  republished  all  three  in  1858  as 
Scenes  of  Clerical  Life.  The  next  year  she  published  her 

1  Lewes  had  received  his  wife  again  after  her  desertion,  and  had  thus  lost 
the  right  to  claim  a  divorce  after  a  second  desertion. 


THE  NOVEL  417 

first  novel,  Adam  Bede,  and  it  was  evident  that  a  new 
writer  and  a  great  one  had  appeared.  Her  next  story, 
The  Mill  on  the  Floss  (1860),  turns  on  the  refusal  of  her 
heroine,  Maggie  Tulliver.  to  break  the  social  law  for  the 
sake  of  her  own  happiness.  There  followed  Silas  Marner 
(1861),  Romola  (1863),  a  historical  novel  of  the  time  of 
Savonarola,  Felix  Holt  (1866),  Middlemarch  (1872),  and 
Daniel  Deronda  (1876).  Besides  these  she  wrote  a 
number  of  poems,  the  longest  being  The  Spanish  Gypsy 
(1868).  After  the  death  of  Lewes  in  1878  she  married 
Mr.  J.  W.  Cross  in  1880,  the  year  of  her  death. 

George  Eliot's  starting-point  in  Adam  Bede  was  an 
incident  in  the  life  of  her  aunt,  who  once  accompanied  to 
the  scaffold  a  poor  girl  condemned  for  child- 
murder.  This  aunt  was  the  original  of  Dinah 
Morris,  the  woman  preacher  who  rides  in  the 
hangman's  cart  with  Hetty  Sorrel.  Hetty's  aunt,  Mrs. 
Poyser,  is  said  to  show  some  traits  of  George  Eliot's 
mother;  and  Adam  Bede  was  drawn  from  her  father.  In- 
deed, in  her  realism  she  was  in  large  measure  dependent 
on  the  material  of  her  own  early  life  in  Warwickshire 
and  Derbyshire.  The  Mill  on  the  Floss  abounds  in  local 
studies  of  charming  humor.  The  elder  Tullivers,  the 
Gleggs  and  the  Pullets,  and  Bob  Jakin,  are  as  definite 
as  Scott's  minor  characters,  and  as  amusing  as  those  of 
Dickens.  In  Romola  she  made  a  scholarly  effort  to  repro- 
duce faithfully  the  past,  but  the  effort  has  not  the  reality 
of  her  earlier  books.  In  Middlemarch  she  returned  to 
the  provincial  life  of  the  Midland  counties  with  conspicu- 
ous success  in  such  characters  as  the  Garths  and  the 
Vincys.  The  chief  sign  of  decline  in  George  Eliot's  last 
novel,  Daniel  Deronda,  is  the  attempt  to  replace  these 
vigorous  living  beings  with  badly  imagined  puppets  like 
the  Meyricks.  She  had  used  up  the  material  of  her 
youth,  and  found  nothing  in  her  brilliant  life  of  culture 
and  travel  to  take  its  place. 


418  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Adam  Bede  is  the  most  natural  of  George  Eliot's  books-, 
simple  in  problem,  direct  in  action,  with  the  freshness  an* I 
strength    of    the    Derbyshire    landscape   and 
Asa,       .        character  and  speech  in  its  pages.     Its  suc- 
cessor, The  Mill  on  the  Floss  (1860),  show.i 
signs  of  a  growing  perplexity  on  the  part  of  the  author, 
of  a  hesitation  between  her  art  and  her  message.     Fat 
George  Eliot  was  more  than  an  observer;  she  was  also  a 
scientist  and  a  moralist.     She  was  not  content  to  picture 
human  life  as  it  appears.     She  tried  to  pierce  behind  tho 
"  shows  of  things,  and  to  reveal  the  forces  by  which  they 
are  controlled.     Accordingly  she  analyzes  her  characters. 
In  the  case  of  the  simple  types  this  analysis  takes  th'.'. 
form  of  comment,  rapid,  incisive,  and  quite  convincing. 
She  tells  us,  for  example,  that  Mrs.  Tulliver  was  like  th<» 
goldfish  who  continues  to  butt  his  head  against  the  en- 
circling  globe;  and  at  once  the  type  of  cheerful  incapacity 
to  learn  by  experience  is  fixed  before  us  forever.     In  th<« 
case  of  the  more  conscious,  developed  characters,  hei» 
analysis  is  more  elaborate  and  more  sustained.     For  her 
heroines  George  Eliot  drew  largely  upon  her  own  spiritual 
experience,    and    this   personal   psychology   she   supple 
mented  by  wide  reading,  especially  of  the  literature  oif 
confessions.     In  this  way  she  gained  an  extraordinary 
vividness  in  portraying  the  inner  life.     Her  most  charac- 
teristic passages  are  those  in  which  she  follows  the  ebb 
and  flow  of  decision  in  a  character's  mind,  dwelling  on  the 
triumph  or  defeat  of  a  personality  in  a  drama  where  there 
is  but  one  actor.     Such  a  drama  is  that  which  Maggfc 
Tulliver  plays  out  in  her  heart,  torn  between  the  impulse 
to  take  her  joy  as  it  offers,  and  the  unconquerable  con  • 
viction  that  she  cannot  seek  her  own  happiness  by  sacri* 
ficing  others. 

Further  it  is  to  be  noted  that  George  Eliot  never  let* 
her  case  drop  with  the  individual  analysis.  She  alwaj^ 
strives  to  make  her  case  typical,  to  show  that  the  pe^sona^ 


THE    NOVEL  419 

action  and  the  results  which  follow  both  to  the  individ- 
ual and  to  society  are  in  accordance  with  general  laws. 
Dorothea's  defeat  and  Lydgate's  failure  in 
Middlemarch,  Tito's  degeneration  in  Romola,  Moralist 
Gwendolen  Harleth's  humiliation  and  recov- 
ery in  Daniel  Deronda,  are  all  represented  as  occurring  in 
obedience  to  laws  of  the  ethical  world,  as  immutable  as 
those  of  the  physical.  This  is  George  Eliot's  chief  func- 
tion as  a  writer,  the  interpretation  of  the  world  in  terms 
of  morality.  She  does  not  deal  with  party  questions, 
nor  primarily  with  industrial  or  social  problems.  Her 
ethical  motive  is  a  broader  one  than  the  emancipation  of 
thought,  or  the  formulation  of  a  political  programme.  It 
is  to  show  how,  in  obedience  to  law,  character  grows  or 
decays;  how  a  single  fault  or  flaw  brings  suffering  and 
death,  and  throws  a  world  into  ruin;  how,  on  the  other 
hand,  there  is  a  making  perfect  through  suffering,  a  re- 
generation through  sin  itself,  a  hope  for  the  world  through 
the  renunciation  and  self-sacrifice  of  the  individual.  "It 
is  a  blind  self-seeking,"  she  tells  us  through  Dinah  Morris, 
"  which  wants  to  be  freed  from  the  sorrow  wherewith  the 
whole  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth,"  for,  as  she  says 
again,  "those  who  live  and  suffer  may  sometimes  have 
the  blessedness  of  being  a  salvation."  It  is  this  possibil- 
ity of  blessedness  which  in  George  Eliot's  view  is  the 
compensation  for  evil;  that  we  may 

Be  to  other  souls 

The  cup  of  strength  in  some  great  agony 

in  part  makes  up  for  the  presence  of  that  agony  in  the 
world.  Whatever  be  the  scientific  value  of  a  system  of 
ethics  which  makes  the  service  of  humanity  the  highest 
reason  for  doing  right,  or  whatever  the  disparity  between 
the  novelist's  art  and  the  presentation  of  such  a  system, 
George  Eliot's  work  represents  the  most  conscious  and 
sincere  development  of  fiction  with  a  purpose. 


420  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

It  is  significant  of  the  slow  growth  of  George  Meredith's 

literary  reputation  that,  though  we  think  of  him  as  the 

successor  of  George  Eliot,  his  first  novel  ap- 

Sreor!f,t,         peared  before  hers.     He  was  born  in   1828, 

Meredith. 

began  his  literary  career  with  a  volume  of 
poems  in  1851,  and  published  The  Shaving  of  Shagpat,  an 
oriental  burlesque,  in  1856.  His  first  great  novel,  The 
Ordeal  of  Richard  Fever  el,  appeared  in  1859,  and  other 
works  at  intervals  of  two  or  three  years.  Of  these, 
Beauchamp's  Career  (1876),  The  Egoist  (1879),  Diana  of 
the  Crossways  (1885),  One  of  Our  Conquerors  (1891),  Lord 
Ormont  and  His  Aminta  (1894),  and  The  Amazing  Mar- 
riage (1895)  are  the  most  noteworthy.  He  died  in  1909. 
Meredith,  like  George  Eliot,  is  a  psychologist,  and  in 
some  sort  a  moralist.  He  chooses  situations  and  events 

from  actual  life,  and  analyzes  the  reaction  of 
S  n*s  characters  with  great  minuteness.  This 


is  notably  the  case  in  Diana  of  the  Crossways, 
in  which  he  takes  a  well-known  case  of  a  prominent  lit- 
erary woman  who  sold  to  a  newspaper  a  political  secret 
intrusted  to  her  by  her  lover.  Meredith  boldly  imagines 
all  the  mental  states  surrounding  such  an  act,  from 
temptation  to  retribution.  Here,  as  in  all  his  novels,  he 
tests  his  characters  by  their  response  to  the  situation, 
which  is  often  of  an  unusual,  sometimes  of  a  grotesque 
nature.  Even  when  they  fall,  even  when  they  suffer  de- 
feat, it  may  be  that  they  show  true  metal  and  are  of 
heroic  stuff.  Like  George  Eliot,  Meredith  is  concerned 
with  sins  of  the  self,  but  whereas  George  Eliot  shows  in- 
variably the  tragic  results  of  selfishness,  Meredith  works 
also  through  comedy;  the  one  scourges  evil-doers;  the 
other  makes  them  ridiculous.  The  Egoist  is  a  comedy  in 
Ben  Jonson's  sense,  as  purging  in  its  morality  as  clas- 
sical tragedy. 

Meredith  was  in  open  revolt  against  the  realistic  school 
of  his  day,  which  held  that  the  object  of  art  was  to  repro- 


THE   NOVEL  421 

duce  life  with  scrupulous  minuteness.  He  shows  this  in 
his  selection  of  unusual  situations,  in  his  suppression  of 
detail,  and  in  his  emphasis  upon  the  things 
that  are  truly  significant.  While  George 
Eliot  seeks  to  present  a  fully  developed 
human  society,  and  is  at  pains  to  make  her  characters 
talk  with  absolute  realism,  Meredith  concentrates  atten- 
tion upon  his  typical  characters,  and  cares  little  whether 
his  men  and  women  talk  naturally  so  long  as  they  em- 
body the  essential,  spiritual  truth  of  humanity.  His  dia- 
logue is  more  highly  compressed,  more  heavily  loaded 
with  meaning,  than  it  could  be  in  actual  life.  The  same 
pursuit  of  the  essential  makes  him  abrupt  in  structure; 
he  shifts  the  scene  suddenly,  he  drops  the  thread  of  his 
story  and  picks  it  up  again  where  he  wills,  in  such  a  man- 
ner as  to  render  it  difficult  for  any  but  a  practised  reader 
to  follow  him.  Like  Browning,  instead  of  presenting  his 
tale  in  plain,  clear  narrative,  he  prefers  to  give  it  to  us 
in  flashes  and  half-lights,  as  it  is  seen  from  different  points 
of  view.  He  plays  round  his  story,  seeming  to  miss  a 
hundred  strong  situations  for  which  the  reader  actually 
hungers.  But  this  is  the  strategy  of  novel-writing. 
After  pages  of  skirmishing  he  at  last  brings  his  characters 
to  battle  in  just  that  relation  in  which  every  force  is 
available.  Thus  in  vital  moments  Meredith  does  for  his 
readers,  more  than  any  other  novelist,  what  the  artist 
should  do — he  gives  a  heightened  sense  of  realities.  He 
does  not  reproduce  life;  he  does  not  decorate  it;  he  does 
not  idealize  it;  but  he  exemplifies  it  in  types  and  situa- 
tions of  unusual  meaning  and  power. 

As  has  been  said,  Meredith  was  a  poet  before  he  was  a 
novelist,  and  he  became  a  great  one,  though  in  this  char- 
acter, also,  the  public  has  been  slow  to  recog- 
nize him.     He  was  personally  a  friend  of  the       poetry. 
Preraphaelites,  and  from  them  took  over  the 
literary  ballad,  in  which  form  "The  Nuptials  of  Attila" 


422  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

is  his  best.  His  poems  possess  many  of  the  qualities  of 
his  novels.  Modern  Love  (1862)  is  a  psychological  analy- 
sis of  a  tragic  marriage  in  a  sequence  of  sonnets,  each  of 
sixteen  lines.  In  the  "Ode  to  the  Comic  Spirit,"  which 
he  calls  "sword  of  the  common  sense,"  he  sets  forth  the 
part  of  comedy  in  awakening  the  minds  of  men  to  the 
great  issues  of  life.  In  "A  Faith' on  Trial,"  with  an  opti- 
mism which  reminds  one  of  Browning,  he  cries  his  belief 
in  nature,  which  has  evolved  the  mind  of  man  from  mere 
sentient  life.  But  his  greatest  poem  by  common  consent 
is  "Love  in  the  Valley."  This  is  a  genuine  pastoral,  the 
exquisite  beauty  and  grace  of  a  girl  weaving  itself  through 
pictures  of  nature  from  dawn  to  noon  and  twilight  and 
night,  under  sun  and  rain  and  wind,  amid  flowers  and 
birds  and  country  sights  and  sounds,  making  a  whole 
of  infinite  loveliness,  a  harmony  that  belongs  to  a  sym- 
phony as  well  as  to  a  poem. 

Thomas  Hardy's  career  has,  like  Meredith's,  been  a 
long  one.  He  published  Desperate  Remedies  in  1868  and 
A  Pair  of  Blue  Eyes  in  1873.  ^ar  from  Me 
Hh^yas  Madding  Crowd  (1874)  and  The  Return  of 
the  Native  (1878)  followed.  His  popular  rep- 
utation began,  however,  with  Tess  of  the  D' Urbervilles 
(1892),  and  was  established  by  Jude  the  Obscure  (1896). 
Since  that  time  he  has  devoted  himself  to  poetry,  writing 
many  ballads  of  the  southwest  of  England,  and  a  long 
poem  in  dramatic  form,  The  Dynasts  (1903-1908),  in 
which  he  develops  themes  of  the  great  world  struggle 
centring  about  Napoleon. 

Hardy's  art  is  in  sharp  contrast  to  Meredith's,  both  in 

fiction  and  poetry.     In  Meredith's  view  of  life,  man  is 

all  important.    The  works  of  man,  his  society, 

%*"*  his  consciousness,  and  his  expression  of  him- 

Meredith.        self,  are  the  great  facts  of  the  world.     Man  is 

indeed  held  down  and  sacrificed,  by  his  own 

mistakes  and  by  those  of  his  fellows;  but  he  can  rise 


THE   NOVEL  423 

against  this  human  perverseness,  attack  it,  and  overthrow 
it,  or  die  valiantly  in  the  attempt.  The  struggle  of  hu- 
manity is  one  of  a  man  with  men,  or  of  a  woman  against 
a  world  of  men,  and  is  always  capable  of  yielding  glorious 
victory.  This  hope  gives  brightness  to  all  of  Meredith's 
books,  even  to  the  most  tragic.  In  Hardy's  world,  on 
the  other  hand,  man  is  of  the  smallest  importance;  the 
study  of  man's  intellect  and  of  his  works  will  never 
bring  us  nearer  to  the  secret  of  the  universe,  to  the  es- 
sential reason  or  unreason  of  things.  A  man  is  not 
held,  thwarted,  and  insulted  by  his  fellows  only;  his  war- 
fare is  not  chiefly  with  them;  the  perversity  of  his  lot  is 
not  chiefly  of  their  making.  It  is  rather  of  the  very 
nature  of  the  world  into  which  he  is  born,  a  world  full 
of  the  irony  of  circumstance.  It  is  true,  human  beings 
are  often  the  vehicles  of  that  irony,  but  we  cannot  say 
that  Hardy's  heroes  are  conquered  by  human  opponents. 
They  fall  before  they  can  come  to  close  quarters  with 
the  enemy. 

Tess  Durbeyfield  meets  mischance  after  mischance  in 
a  lot  which  is  not  of  her  choosing.  Again  and  again  she 
is  defeated  in  her  effort  to  make  known  to  her  betrothed 
what  has  befallen  her;  and  when  at  last  on  her  marriage 
night  she  tells  him,  she  is  met  by  a  flat  denial  of  her  per- 
sonality. "You  were  one  person;  now  you  are  another. 
.  .  .  The  woman  I  have  been  loving  is  not  you."  Jude 
the  Obscure,  checked  in  his  ambition  for  scholarship, 
cannot  get  near  the  man  behind  the  system  which  damns 
him.  He  can  only  write  bitter  words  on  the  outside 
wall  of  the  college  which  refuses  him  admittance.  Thus 
Hardy's  world  is  without  the  element  of  healthful,  hope- 
ful combat.  Life  is  tragic  by  hypothesis;  the  irony  of 
circumstance  is  a  recognizable  element  in  the  meta- 
physical constitution  of  the  world.  Often  the  operations 
of  this  time-spirit  are  humorous,  with  a  grim,  contemp- 
tuous humor  that  is  as  bitter  as  its  malice. 


424  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

In  contrast  with  the  insignificance  of  man,  Hardy  pre- 
sents the  eternal  reality  of  nature.  With  him  the  scene 
is  an  element  of  first  importance,  essential  in 
^e  development  of  the  story.  Sometimes  he 
treats  it,  especially  in  his  early  work,  in  a 
poetic  and  idyllic  fashion,  as  an  escape  from  the  tragedy 
of  life — the  pastoral  escape.  But  more  often  he  uses  it 
with  symbolical  meaning,  as  when  he  makes  the  warped, 
misshapen,  stunted  trees  in  The  Woodlanders  suggest 
"the  unfulfilled  intention"  in  human  life;  or  he  represents 
it  as  the  embodiment  of  the  power  not  ourselves  which 
works  man's  humiliation.  It  is  noteworthy  that  in  his 
human  types  he  chooses  those  which  are  closest  to  nature, 
those  in  which  the  primitive  impulses  are  strongest. 
Meredith  draws  his  characters  from  the  walks  of  life 
where  men  and  women  are  most  complex,  where  thought 
is  most  active.  In  Hardy's  view,  thought  is  as  futile 
toward  truth  as  was  the  Tower  of  Babel  to  scale  the  heav- 
ens. Meredith,  in  his  belief  in  the  significant,  is  continu- 
ally heightening  the  individual,  pushing  his  characters 
beyond  human  limits.  Hardy  holds  that  nothing  in  man 
is  significant  except  race,  sex,  and  the  great  servitude  to 
time  and  nature;  and  hence  he  chooses  types  which  will 
present  these  realities  most  clearly. 

Hardy  began  to  write  novels  when  George  Eliot  was  at 
the  height  of  her  fame,  and  her  influence  is  clearly  to  be 
H^d  ^  seen  in  his  work.  Like  her  he  is  a  psychologist 
Philosophy.  an^  a  realist — bolder,  indeed,  in  his  realism, 
since  he  had  also  before  him  the  examples  of 
the  French  naturalists,  Zola  and  Maupassant.  He  is 
also  the  product  of  a  scientific  age,  though  law  in  his 
universe  becomes  fatalism,  the  manifestation  of  a  blind 
"will  to  live"  which,  from  the  human  point  of  view, 
often  seems  malevolent  caprice. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  identify  the  pessimistic  back- 
ground of  Hardy's  novels  with  a  personal  creed.     It  is 


THE   NOVEL  425 

enough  to  say  that  it  was  in  harmony  with  the  mood  of 
the  late  nineteenth  century,  a  mood  of  discouragement 
and  disillusionment  resulting  in  part  from  the 
decline  of  religious  faith,  and  the  account  of 
the  world  and  of  man's  position  in  it  given  an? 
by  science.  Just  as  the  influence  of  Kant  and 
the  romantic  philosophers  contributed  to  the  Romantic 
Movement  in  literature  of  the  early  century,  so  the  influ- 
ence of  Schopenhauer,  with  his  presentation  of  life  as  the 
result  of  a  blind  "will  to  live"  manifesting  itself  ruth- 
lessly in  defiance  of  man's  conscious  reason,  counted  for 
much  in  determining  the  realistic  and  pessimistic  spirit 
of  its  close.  It  is  in  such  times  that  the  romantic  view, 
by  providing  an  escape  from  the  discouraging  contem- 
plation of  the  realities  of  human  society  and  suggesting 
the  possibilities  of  independent,  ideal,  life  in  each  indi- 
vidual, may  be  a  wholesome  and  invigorating  tonic — and 
as  such  we  must  consider  the  work  of  Robert  Louis  Ste- 
venson. 

Stevenson  was  born  in  Edinburgh  in  1850.  After  a 
brief  attempt  at  the  study  of  law  he,  like  Scott,  gave  him- 
self to  literature.  His  first  ventures  were  crit- 
ical essays,  in  which,  following  the  romantic 
critics,  he  made  literature  a  happy  hunting- 
ground  for  adventure.  He  next  sought  experience  of 
life  in  the  same  spirit.  A  canoe  trip  among  the  rivers 
and  canals  of  Belgium  and  northern  France  gave  him 
material  for  An  Inland  Voyage  (1878),  and  a  trip  through 
the  Cevennes  Mountains  supplied  that  for  Travels  with  a 
Donkey  (1879).  A  rapid  journey  across  sea  and  land  to 
San  Francisco  to  meet  his  future  wife  similarly  resulted 
in  The  Amateur  Emigrant,  and  some  of  the  sketches  in 
Across  the  Plains;  the  fruits  of  his  honeymoon  in  the 
Sierras  appeared  in  The  Silverado  Squatters  (1883).  Tu- 
berculosis forced  him  into  a  long  search  for  health  at 
Davos  Platz,  at  Hyeres,  and  in  the  Adirondacks,  and  in- 


426  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

stead  of  personal  adventure  he  was  obliged  to  have  re- 
course to  imagination.  Treasure  Island  (1883)  is  a  fas- 
cinating tale  of  piracy  and  search  for  treasure;  Kidnapped 
(1886)  and  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  (1889)  continue  this 
vein.  The  Strange  Case  of  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde  ( 1 886) 
is  a  tale  of  spiritual  adventure,  a  superstition  of  science 
fraught  with  a  moral  symbolism.  In  1890  he  sailed  from 
San  Francisco  for  Samoa,  where  he  spent  the  last  years 
of  his  life,  finding  in  the  South  Seas  new  and  strange  mat- 
ter for  the  Island  Nights  Entertainments  (1893)  an^  Ebb 
Tide  (1894).  His  imagination  carried  him  back  to  his 
early  field,  Scotland  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  he 
wrote  David  Balfour  (1893),  a  sequel  to  Kidnapped,  and 
was  engaged  on  two  unfinished  romances,  St.  Ives  and 
Weir  of  Hermiston  at  the  time  of  his  death  in  1894. 

Stevenson  differed  from  many  of  the  writers  of  fiction 
thus  far  considered,  in  that  he  was  by  no  means  a  novelist 

by  accident.  He  tried  his  hand  at  plays  and 
Thee*8!!?'8  Poetrv>  as  we^  as  essays,  but  came  to  fiction 
Fiction.  by  conscious  choice.  Not  only  did  he  seek 

material,  but  by  practice  and  study  he 
evolved  his  style,  in  the  spirit  of  an  artist.  For  he  held 
the  belief  that  art,  and  especially  the  art  of  fiction,  has  a 
great  function  to  perform  in  life.  He  did  not  believe 
that  this  function  was  to  reproduce  life.  He  repudiated 
the  theory  that  art  can  " compete  with  life,"  in  Henry 
James's  phrase,  or  that  it  should  be  sacrificed  to  make 
life  better,  as  in  George  Eliot's  practice.  He  held  that 
only  by  reaching  its  utmost  attainable  perfection  can  art 
perform  its  true  service  to  life — by  enabling  men  to  escape 
from  its  superficial  commonplace  "  realities,"  in  which 
their  daily  existence  must  be  passed,  into  realms  of 
spiritual  freedom.  "Fiction,"  he  maintained  seriously, 
"should  be  to  the  grown  man  what  play  is  to  the  child." 
"His  life  from  without  may  seem  but  a  rude  mound  of 
mud;  there  will  be  some  golden  chamber  at  the  heart 


THE   NOVEL  427 

of  it  in  which  he  dwells  delighted."  It  is  to  evoke  that 
"golden  chamber  of  a  man's  dreams"  that  Stevenson 
considers  the  function  of  romance. 

Stevenson  has  presented  in  several  essays  his  artistic 
theory,  according  to  which  incident  is  to  be  regarded  as 
the  highest  mood  of  fiction.  But  his  practice 
in  his  later  works  shows  that  he  did  not  sat-  stevenson's 
isfy  himself  with  merely  inventing  surprising 
adventures  and  imagining  remote  conditions.  With  him 
human  nature  and  human  issues  are  at  the  centre  of  the 
developing  web  of  event;  and  from  the  most  romantic 
background  human  character  disengages  itself  in  strong, 
clear  forms.  Alan  Breck  on  the  Scottish  moors,  in  Kid- 
napped, and  Wiltshire,  in  The  Beach  of  Falesd,  are  both 
incontrovertibly  actual.  Stevenson's  romanticism  shows 
itself  most  interestingly,  also,  in  a  spirit  of  artistic  enter- 
prise and  adventure.  His  novels  and  tales  are  more 
various  and  daring  in  their  method  and  technic  than 
those  of  any  of  his  predecessors;  and  on  the  whole  his 
artistic  experiments  justify  themselves.  In  firmness  and 
clearness  of  structure,  in  devices  of  description  and  nar- 
rative, and  in  surface  brilliancy  of  style,  he  marks  the 
extraordinary  technical  advance  which  the  novel  has 
made  since  the  days  of  Scott. 

Stevenson  owed  his  intimate  friendship  with  his  readers 
more  perhaps  to  his  essays  than  to  his  novels.  He  was  a 
successor  of  the  romantic  essayists  of  the  early  century, 
reminding  us  of  Hazlitt  in  the  range  of  his  subject-matter 
and  the  zest  with  which  he  reacted  to  books,  cities,  pic- 
tures, sports,  experience  of  life,  and  the  characters  of  his 
fellow  men.  Underlying  all  this  there  was  a  philosophy 
quite  in  harmony  with  his  serious  view  of  the  function  of 
romance,  a  philosophy  most  definitely  stated  in  two 
essays  in  the  series  Across  the  Plains— " Pulvis  et  Umbra'1 
and  "A  Christmas  Sermon."  At  the  outset  he  accepts 
the  scientific  view  of  the  world.  "Of  the  Kosmos,  in  the 


428  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

last  resort,  science  reports  many  doubtful  things,  and  all 
of  them  appalling."  The  universe  is  "space  sown  with 
rotatory  islands,"  made  of  " something  we  call  matter," 
which  "rots  uncleanly  into  something  we  call  life,"  which 
in  turn  preys  on  itself — "lives  tearing  other  lives  in  pieces, 
cramming  them  inside  themselves"  until  "our  rotatory 
island  is  more  drenched  with  blood  .  .  .  than  ever  muti- 
nied ship."  But  in  man,  the  final  product  of 

Stevenson's  .  r  _      .  , 

Essays.  this   fearful  process,  we  find     one  thought, 

His  .  strange  to  the  point  of  lunacy;  the  thought 

of  duty;  the  thought  of  something  owing  to 
himself,  to  his  neighbor,  to  his  God."  Nay,  the  theory 
of  evolution,  emphasizing  man's  kinship  with  the  lower 
animals,  gives  ground  for  believing  that  something  of  the 
same  ideal  animates  all  life.  Thus  he  concludes,  "God 
forbid  it  should  be  man  that  wearies  in  well-doing,  that 
despairs  of  unrewarded  effort,  or  utters  the  language 
of  complaint."  It  is  to  this  that  the  religious  faith  of 
Tennyson,  and  the  moral  sanctions  of  George  Eliot  fine 
themselves  down;  but  the  assertion  is  made  as  confidently 
as  theirs,  though  in  lower  terms;  and  represents  as  com- 
plete an  answer  to  materialism  and  pessimism.  Steven- 
son was,  in  effect,  at  one  with  Browning  and  Meredith 
in  their  optimistic  striving;  and  his  romantic  art,  like 
theirs,  may  be  considered  as  the  collection  of  instances  of 
the  manifestation  of  such  idealism. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE 

IN  a  sense  the  historical  treatment  of  English  literature 
may  properly  end  with  the  two  writers  who  close  the  last 
two  chapters — Pater  and   Stevenson.     They 
represent  the  culmination  of  long  literary  tra-  and 
dition,  and  they  are  the  most  recent  writers  Contemporary 
to  whom  can,  with  certainty,  be  ascribed  a 
permanent  place  in  such  a  record  as  this  book  aims  to 
give.     Moreover,  the  period  which  follows,  including  the 
last  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  the  opening  years 
of  the  twentieth,  is  one  in  which  production  is  so  enor- 
mous, and  schools  and  tendencies  so  numerous  and  contra- 
dictory, that  without  a  longer  perspective  than  is  now  ob- 
tainable it  is  difficult  to  give  a  systematic  account  of  them. 

One  striking  and  fundamental  difference  between  con- 
temporary and  historical  literature  appears  in  the  change 
in  the  character  and  position  of  literature  it- 
self in  relation  to  the  whole  body  of  human  a'nt(Jrature 
life.  Throughout  the  history  of  literature  we  Democracy, 
recognize  a  distinction,  more  or  less  sharply 
drawn,  between  those  writers  to  whom  writing  is  an  art 
governed  by  rules,  who  minister  to  a  reading  public  of 
connoisseurs  educated  by  criticism,  and  those  who  use 
writing  as  a  means  of  direct  popular  appeal,  and  to  whom, 
as  to  their  audience,  considerations  of  form  are  unimpor- 
tant compared  to  those  of  subject-matter.  At  the  present 
time  the  second  or  democratic  tendency  in  literature 
has  been  intensely  stimulated  by  popular  education. 
Everybody  reads,  and  the  mighty  business  of  supplying 
reading  matter  to  an  immense  and  voracious  public  has 
tended  to  break  down  the  direction  and  limitation  of  lit- 
429 


430  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

erature  as  an  art.  And  on  the  other  hand,  the  men  of 
letters  no  longer  form  an  exclusive  caste — an  institution 
to  which  the  reading  public  looks  for  guidance  in  its  taste. 
The  profession  of  writing  is  not  protected,  as  is  that  of 
painting  or  musical  composition,  by  an  exacting  technic 
which  must  be  mastered.  Just  as  everybody  reads,  so 
nearly  everybody  writes,  or  threatens  to  do  so.  To  de- 
fine writing  as  an  art,  therefore,  to  value  its  product  as 
literature,  and  to  trace  the  forces  governing  its  produc- 
tion as  criticism,  become  increasingly  difficult.  More 
than  ever,  literary  product  is  a  matter  of  social,  not  of 
literary  history. 

The  first  influence  of  democracy  on  literature  has  been 
to  increase  it  in  amount;  the  second  has  been  to  diversify 
it.  The  reading  public  is  now  too  large  to  be 
Literature  guided  by  any  dominant  interest,  either  in 
thought  or  form.  Thus  the  material  of  the 
past  has  been  increasingly  drawn  upon,  and  there  is  at 
the  same  time  a  more  resolute  effort  to  use  the  substance 
of  contemporary  life,  to  make  every  department  of  that 
life  a  subject  of  literary  treatment.  The  subject-matter 
of  contemporary  literature  shows  the  eclecticism  which 
we  noted  in  the  Victorian  Age;  its  spirit  and  forms  are 
still  more  various  and  unstable.  The  neopagan  view  of 
life  is  opposed  by  a  vigorous  neochristian  school;  the 
doctrine  of  escape  from  life  is  met  by  a  resolute  neostoic 
assertion  of  the  strenuous  life;  pessimism  is  combated  by 
optimism;  scientific  materialism,  by  new  schools  of  spiri- 
tual interpretation.  Literary  forms  undergo  strange 
transmutations,  and  literary  fashions  succeed  each  other 
with  bewildering  rapidity. 

This  lack  of  any  leading  and  decisive  direction  in  the 

abundant  literary  movement  of  the  last  decade  of  the 

Realism          nineteenth  century  entitles  it  to  the  name 

decadence — that  is,  a  time  when  decay  of  the 

old  is  not  offset  by  any  certain  birth  of  the  new.     It  is, 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  43! 

however,  now  possible  to  see,  in  this  confusion,  one  ten- 
dency, which,  carried  forward,  may  prove  to  be  the 
characterizing  impulse  of  the  early  twentieth  century,  as 
romanticism  was  of  the  early  nineteenth,  and  classicism 
of  the  early  eighteenth.  That  tendency  is  determined  by 
the  interest  of  the  new  vast  reading  public  in  realities,  in 
the  facts  that  govern  our  habitation  of  the  earth.  But 
contemporary  realism  is  very  different  from  the  interest 
in  the  phenomena  of  the  surface  of  society  which  goes 
under  that  name  in  the  past.  As  the  result  of  the  influ- 
ence of  science,  it  looks  deeper  and  values  facts  for  their 
significance.  At  the  same  time  it  is  acutely  conscious  of 
the  meaning  of  fact  for  the  immediate  present — it  is,  in 
other  words,  journalistic. 

Journalistic  realism  may  then  be  accepted  as  a  defini- 
tion of  the  leading  tendency  of  contemporary  literature. 
Its  effect  is  seen  in  the  personal  attitude  of 

Journal  i  sin, 

writers  toward  their  art.  Whereas  formerly 
they  aspired  to  greatness  in  terms  of  time — 
seeking,  in  Milton's  fine  phrase,  "to  leave 
something  so  written  to  aftertimes,  as  they  should  not 
willingly  let  it  die" — to-day  the  success  of  a  writer  is 
estimated  in  space — in  the  wide  extent  of  his  momentary 
appeal.  To  possess  the  whole  of  the  public  for  a  few 
years,  instead  of  a  "fit  audience  though  few"  for  cen- 
turies, has  come  to  be  the  object  of  ambition.  And  ac- 
cordingly as  literature  has  become  more  highly  contem- 
porary than  ever  before,  its  realism  has  become  more 
penetrating  and  sensational,  more  immediate  and  minute. 
A  powerful  support  to  this  new  realism  is  found  in  the 
artistic  device  of  impressionism;  instead  of  philosophically 
trying  to  tell  the  whole  truth  about  an  object  the  author 
is  satisfied  to  present  with  his  utmost  force  the  aspect  of 
it  which  appeals  most  strongly  to  himself.  And  a  second 
support  is  found  in  the  device  of  symbolism — that  form 
of  idealism  which  sees  in  the  commonplace  details  of  life 


432  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

a  significance  beyond  mere  fact,  a  suggestion  of  power, 
psychic  or  spiritual,  beyond  the  definition  of  our  intel- 
lect. These  three  terms — journalism,  or  preoccupation 
with  the  immediate  present;  impressionism,  or  emphasis 
upon  a  single  point  of  view;  and  symbolism,  or  suggestion 
of  spiritual  significance,  are  of  constant  occurrence  in  the 
discussion  of  contemporary  literature.  As  we  look  back, 
we  see  them  in  the  literature  of  the  past — there  was 
journalism  in  the  Elizabethan  drama,  in  the  eighteenth- 
century  novel;  there  was  impressionism  in  nineteen  th- 
century  criticism  and  poetry;  there  was  abundant  sym- 
bolism in  poetry,  from  Langland  to  Browning — but  never 
have  the  three  been  so  closely  and  consciously  united  to 
form  a  literary  ideal  and  determine  a  literary  technic 
as  in  the  present.  The  qualities  of  that  technic  may 
be  defined  as  timeliness,  vividness,  and  significance. 

The  influence  of  realism  on  the  types  of  literature  is 
seen  in  the  general  tendency  to  subordinate  form  to  mat- 
ter— to  reduce  to  a  minimum  all  technical 
LUeli™  and     considerations  which  stand  in  the  way  of  the 
Forms.  immediate    communication    of    the    writer's 

thought  to  his  public.  We  see  this  in  the 
breaking  down  of  conventions  which  were  supposed  to 
characterize  the  several  literary  forms  and  to  be  essen- 
tial to  their  definition.  The  structure  of  the  novel,  for 
instance,  is  no  longer  the  careful  balance  of  characters 
in  an  ordered  plot  or  intrigue;  it  is  more  likely  to  be  an 
assembling  of  vital  figures  and  facts  in  that  casual  and 
accidental  association  which  is  characteristic  of  real  life. 
The  drama  owes  its  revival  as  a  serious  form  of  literature 
largely  to  its  abandonment  of  artificial  construction  and 
its  direct  treatment  of  human  material.  Nowhere  is  this 
modification  of  form  to  suit  the  requirements  of  real  sub- 
ject-matter more  evident  than  in  poetry,  in  which  the 
technical  elaborations  of  metre  and  rhyme  are  giving 
way  to  very  simple  and  direct  rhythmical  utterance. 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  433 

Of  the  confusion  of  tendencies  in  thought  and  form 
which,  as  has  been  said,  justifies  the  term  decadence  in 
description  of  the  later  nineteenth  and  early  twentieth 
century,  two  writers,  both  born  in  Ireland,  Oscar  Wilde 
and  George  Moore,  are  conspicuous  examples.  Both 
practised  many  forms  of  literature,  and  both  exemplify 
the  rapid  change  of  attitude  and  fashion  characteristic 
of  the  period. 

'Oscar  Wilde  (1856-1900)  was  born  in  Dublin  and  edu- 
cated at  Dublin  and  Oxford.  At  the  latter  university  he 
came  under  the  influence  of  both  Preraphael- 

,  .   ,  .  ,  Oscar  Wilde. 

itism  and  neopaganism,  which  are  evident  in 
his  first  volume  of  poems,  published  in  1881.  It  was  to 
popularize  the  pagan  attitude  toward  life  that  he  began 
to  lecture,  in  the  effort  to  enlist  the  public  in  the  so-called 
aesthetic  movement,  or  cult  of  beauty  in  life.  He  con- 
tinued his  literary  career  with  fiction,  dramas,  and  essays 
— a  restless  search  for  novelty  characteristic  of  the  end 
of  the  century.  Not  only  did  he  enter  all  departments  of 
literature,  but  in  each  his  work  is  utterly  various;  it  is  as 
if  in  letters  he  were  exemplifying  Pater's  doctrine  of  life 
as  separate  moments,  to  each  of  which  should  be  given 
a  value  for  its  own  sake,  apart  from  those  which  precede 
and  follow.  In  fiction  he  gives  us  the  beautiful  idyl, 
"The  Happy  Prince"  (1888)  and  the  morbid  study  of 
personality,  The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray  (1891);  in  drama 
he  presents  the  comedy  of  manners  in  Lady  Windermere's 
Fan  (1892),  the  pure  farce  in  The  Importance  of  Being 
Earnest  (1897),  and  the  tragedy  in  Salome  (1893),  in 
which  the  pagan  and  Christian  strains  are  mingled  in  the 
sensual  love  of  the  daughter  of  Herodias  for  John  the 
Baptist;  in  the  essay  he  ranged  from  the  brilliant  para- 
doxes and  whimsical  defense  of  absurdities  of  the  Inten- 
tions (1891)  to  the  remorseful  self-study  of  De  Profundis 
(1905).  Finally  in  poetry  he  passes  from  the  artificial 
pagan  and  Preraphaelite  verse  of  his  youth,  with  its  imi- 


J34  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

cation  of  emotion,  to  the  terrible  sincerity  of  "The  Ballad 
Df  Reading  Gaol"  (1898).  This  last,  as  well  as  De  Pro- 
fundis,  was  written  in  prison,  whither  he  was  sent  for 
immorality.  This  experience  seemed  for  a  time  to  bring 
into  his  life  the  sincerity  that  had  been  lacking.  "The 
Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,"  written  in  simple  ballad  metre, 
is  one  of  the  most  poignant  records  of  human  suffering 
in  all  literature.  In  its  simplicity  and  closeness  to  life  it 
anticipates  the  work  of  Masefield  in  the  next  century.  • 

A  second  writer  whose  interests  are  likewise  too  miscel- 
laneous to  allow  him  special  classification,   but  whose 

career  is  an  important  witness  to  shifting 
Moore!  currents  of  literary  influence,  is  George 

Moore.  He  was  born  in  1853,  m  Ireland. 
In  his  early  study  of  art,  in  London  and  Paris,  he  was 
drawn  to  the  unethical,  purely  aesthetic  attitude  toward 
life  which  we  have  called  neopagan,  a  phase  which  is 
represented  by  two  volumes  of  verse,  the  second  called 
Pagan  Poems  (1881).  Later  he  was  deeply  affected  by 
the  French  naturalistic  school  of  fiction  headed  by  Emile 
Zola,  and  when  he  definitely  abandoned  painting  for  writ- 
ing he  published  a  series  of  novels  which  show  a  boldness 
in  dealing  with  life  quite  at  variance  with  the  Victorian 
tradition.  The  first  of  these,  A  Modern  Lover  (1883), 
was  merely  crude  and  vulgar  (it  has  since  been  rewritten), 
but  ten  years  later  in  Esther  Waters  (1894),  George  Moore 
produced  a  masterpiece  of  close  study  of  the  English  ser- 
vant class.  The  heroine  may  be  compared  to  Hardy's 
Tess  of  the  d' Urbervilles  as  an  example  of  utterly  plastic 
human  material,  but  it  is  to  be  noted  that  while  Hardy  is 
under  some  suspicion  of  arranging  his  events  to  corre- 
spond with  his  view  of  a  hostile  universe,  to  Esther  Waters 
things  happen  as  naturally  as  the  falling  of  the  leaves. 
Besides  the  novels  there  belong  to  this  period  Moore's 
first  essay  in  confessional  literature,  Confessions  of  a 
Young  Man  (1888),  and  two  volumes  of  criticism,  7m- 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  435 

pressions  and  Opinions  (1890)  and  Modern  Painting 
(1893),  'm  which  he  did  great  service  by  explaining  and 
defending  impressionistic  and  realistic  schools  of  French 
painting  to  English  readers. 

The  third  phase  of  George  Moore's  activity  began  with 
his  association  with  the  Irish  literary  movement  (see  pp. 
461-467) .  He  took  up  his  residence  in  Dublin, 
and  became  concerned  with  the  Abbey  Thea-  Moore  and 
tre,  for  which  he  wrote  or  collaborated  in  two  Movement, 
plays,  The  Bending  of  the  Bough  (1900)  and 
Diarmid  and  Crania  (1903).  The  most  important  influ- 
ence of  his  connection  with  the  Irish  movement  upon  his 
work  is  seen  in  his  fiction,  in  the  permeation  of  his  realism 
by  symbolism.  This  is  apparent  in  Evelyn  Innes  (1898) 
and  its  sequel,  Sister  Theresa  (1901),  and  still  more  in  the 
beautifully  modulated  tale,  The  Lake  (1905).  This  is  the 
shadowy  love-story  of  an  Irish  priest,  whose  stagnant 
life  is  the  result  alike  of  his  environment  and  character, 
which  are  represented  and  symbolized  by  the  lake  be- 
side which  he  lives.  Another  result  of  Moore's  residence 
in  Dublin  was  to  provide  him  with  material  for  further 
personal  journalism.  His  second  volume  of  autobiogra- 
phy, Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life  (1906),  concerned  an 
earlier  period;  but  the  three  volumes  of  Hail  and  Farewell 
— Ave  (1911),  Salve  (1912),  Vale  (1914) — owe  much  of 
their  piquant  interest  to  his  Irish  associations.  In  his 
contributions  to  the  literature  of  confession  Moore  testi- 
fies powerfully  to  the  journalistic  impulse  of  the  time. 
He  does  not,  like  the  classics  of  such  literature,  present  a 
personality  inspired  by  a  single  aim  or  passion;  rather  he 
gives  us  a  kaleidoscopic  impression  of  rapidly  dissolving 
views  of  life,  the  vividness  of  the  pictures  equalled  by  the 
astonishingly  frank  account  of  his  appearance  in  them. 

George  Moore  is  thus  an  important  witness  to  the 
changing  phases  of  literary  interest  and  fashion  during  a 
whole  generation.  His  style,  detailed  and  matter-of-fact 


436  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  his  novels,  becomes  in  his  confessions  one  of  intimate 
association  with  the  reader,  an  admirable  vehicle  for  the 
journalism  which  he  practises. 


POETRY 

It  is  in  the  poetry  of  the  contemporary  period  that  the 
conflict  between  the  modern  tendency  toward  realistic 
treatment  of  actual  life,  and  the  traditional 
Tendencies      view  of  the  subject-matter  and  forms  appro- 
priate to  literature  is  most  clearly  seen.     On 
the  one  hand,  in  their  endeavor  to  bring  poetry  abreast 
of  present  life,  certain  modern  poets  have  discarded  the 
limited  and  regular  measures  of  poetry,  and  write  verse 
which  is  called  "free"  by  virtue  of  its  adoption  of  the 
longer  and  more  irregular  rhythms  of  prose.     On  the 
other  hand,  poets  using  the  established  themes  and  stories 
of  the  past  have  not  only  gained  immense  facility  in  imi- 
tating  the   technic   of  the  later  Victorians,  Tennyson, 
Arnold,  and  Swinburne,  but  they  have  sought  models 
from  other  periods,  especially  those  of  pronounced  poetic 
invention,  such  as  the  seventeenth  century;  they  have 
carried  farther  the  experiments  of  the  Victorians  in  the 
effort  to  adapt  to  English  use  the  forms  of  the  mediaeval 
and  classical  poetry;  they  have  in  some  cases  succeeded 
in  evolving  a  new  and  more  intricate  if  not  a  grander 
music  than  their  predecessors.     Across  this  main  line  of 
cleavage  among  the  poets  of  the  present  run  countless 
cross-divisions.    The  neopagan  movement  is  continued  in 
poetry,  but  the  Catholic  reaction  has  brought  forth  the 
greatest  school  of  Christian  poets  since  the  seventeenth 
century.    The  discouraged  and  pessimistic  thought,  which 
followed  the  development  of  natural  science,  is  met  by 
the  assertion  of  the  stoic  faith  in  personality.     The  dem- 
ocratic protest  of  one  group  against  the  evil  and  suffering 
under  modern  social  and  industrial  conditions  is  met  by 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  437 

another  group  with  the  challenge  of  England's  dream  of 
world-empire,  an  imperialism  which  has  succeeded,  as  a 
source  of  poetic  inspiration,  the  more  limited  nationalism 
of  the  Victorians.  For  convenience,  however,  we'  shall 
divide  the  present-day  poets  into  two  groups,  according 
as  they  represent  more  completely  the  inheritance  of  the 
past  or  the  call  of  the  future. 

The  power  of  the  past  is  best  illustrated  by  the  vogue 
of  Stephen  Phillips  (1868-1915).  His  Poems  (1897)  are 
full  of  echoes  of  the  great  Victorians.  Two 
poems  in  blank  verse,  " Christ  in  Hades"  and 
"Marpessa,"  the  one  Christian  and  the  other 
Greek  in  subject,  show  Phillips's  reliance  on  the  past  for 
inspiration;  "The  Wife,"  however,  is  a  modern  story  of 
the  streets  of  London,  which  suggests  the  boldness  of  the 
later  realists  in  dealing  with  actual  life. 

Stephen  Phillips  began  life  as  an  actor,  and  following 
Tennyson  and  Browning,  made  many  contributions  to 
the  poetic  drama.  Here  again  he  shows  his  reliance  on 
the  conventional  material  of  the  past;  his  Paolo  and 
Francesca  (1899),  Herod  (1900),  and  Ulysses  (1902)  are 
acceptable  acting  versions  of  great  stories.  It  is  a  some- 
what pathetic  fact  that  only  in  his  last  volume,  Dramas 
and  Lyrics  (1913),  did  Phillips  achieve  any  personal  dis- 
tinction of  thought  and  style,  and  by  that  time  his  early 
and  remarkable  vogue  had  passed. 

William  Watson  (1858)  is  likewise  content  to  go  on 
in  the  paths  of  tradition,  but  while  Phillips  looked  to 
Tennyson  as  his  master,  Watson  returned  to 
the  more   austere  and   limited  measures  of          Watson. 
Arnold  and  Wordsworth.     Watson's  best  poe- 
try was  written  in  memory  of  his  predecessors — "Lachry- 
mcB  Musarum"  on  the  death  of  Tennyson,  "Laleham 
Churchyard"    on   the  grave   of  Matthew  Arnold,    and 
"Wordsworth's  Grave."     Like  Wordsworth  he  used  the 
sonnet  for  comment  on  political  affairs,  and  he  had  the 


438  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

independence  and  courage  to  protest  against  the  resur- 
gence of  imperialism  which  showed  itself  in  the  conquest 
of  the  Soudan. 

A  third  poet  who  may  be  regarded  as  important  chiefly 
as  a  continuation  of  past  tradition  is  the  present  poet- 
laureate,  Robert  Bridges  (1844).    At  the  same 
Brides  tmie  **•  must  De  admitted  that  in  one  direction 

he  has  increased  the  technical  resources  of 
English  poetry — that  is,  by  imitation  of  classical  metres. 
In  these  experiments,  which  involve  the  application  of 
the  principle  of  quantity  to  English  verse,  he  is  more 
successful  than  Tennyson  or  Swinburne.  Bridges  is  above 
all  a  scholarly  poet;  but  this  is  not  to  say  that  he  lacks 
originality.  He  reminds  one  of  certain  of  the  Elizabeth- 
ans whose  study  of  poetry  as  a  conscious  art  did  not  ex- 
clude spontaneity.  Indeed,  the  most  accurate  descrip- 
tion of  Bridges  is  as  a  belated  Elizabethan.  But  he  has 
gone  beyond  the  technic  of  the  Elizabethans,  and  in 
" Nightingales,"  "A  Passer  By,"  and  "On  a  Dead  Child," 
he  has,  by  relying  on  his  sense  of  quantity  in  the  language 
he  uses,  written  poems  that  have  a  new  music. 

Of  the  poets  whose  work  has  shown  advance  in  tech- 
nical resources  over  the  Victorians  the  greatest  is  Francis 
Thompson  (1859-1907).     Born  in  1859,  edu- 
Thompson.       cated  at  a  Roman  Catholic  seminary,  a  stu- 
dent of  medicine,  and  then  for  some  years  a 
wanderer  and  bohemian,  he  at  length  found  refuge  from 
the  world  in  which  he  was  as  much  a  stranger  as  Shelley, 
in  semimonastic  seclusion.     His  greater  poetry  was  pub- 
lished between  1893  arjd  ^9  7. 

Thompson  represents  the  Christian  and  Catholic  spirit, 

in  profound  reaction  from  neopaganism  and 

SST'S      materialism.     Like  the  religious  poets  of  the 

Poetry.  seventeenth  century,  he  desired  passionately 

to  bring  poetry  once  more  into   the   service 

of   a  heavenly  instead   of  an   earthly  love.     In  "To  a 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  439 

Poet  Breaking  Silence,"  he  expresses  the  same  ideal  which 
George  Herbert  (see  p.  167)  set  before  himself. 

Teach  how  the  crucifix  may  be 
Carven  from  the  laurel  tree, 
Fruit  of  the  Hesperides 
Burnish  take  on  Eden  trees, 
The  Muses'  sacred  grove  be  wet 
With  the  red  dew  of  Olivet, 
And  Sappho  lay  her  burning  bows 
On  White  Cecilia's  lap  of  snows. 

In  "The  Hound  of  Heaven"  he  has  dealt  with  the  theme 
of  many  of  Herbert's  and  Vaughn's  poems,  the  pursuit 
of  the  human  soul  by  the  love  of  God — but  with  a  richness 
of  imagery  and  a  sustained  and  swelling  music  that  make 
his  poetry  compared  to  theirs  as  a  modern  symphony  to 
a  Gregorian  chant.  "The  Hound  of  Heaven"  is  the  best 
example  of  Thompson's  immense  technical  resources. 
The  poem,  in  the  ode  form,  with  lines  of  varying  length 
and  irregular  rhyme  scheme,  is  marvellous  in  the  adap- 
tation of  its  movement  to  the  rhythm  of  life  led  by  the 
errant  soul,  with  the  refrain  of  the  insistent  pursuit  always 
nearer  and  more  compelling.  In  contrast  to  the  startling 
variety  of  movement  of  "The  Hound  of  Heaven"  is  the 
stark  austerity  of  the  lines,  "To  the  Dead  Cardinal  of 
Westminster,"  written  in  memory  of  Cardinal  Manning. 
In  the  former  poem  the  theme  is  the  human  soul  in  pres- 
ence of  God;  in  the  latter  it  is  the  soul  in  presence  of  a 
greater  soul,  an  earthly  captain,  and  in  both  the  attitude 
is  that  of  pathetic  humility,  wholly  and  sincerely  Chris- 
tian. 

Thompson's  love-poems  deal  with  the  subtleties  of  a 
passion,  unearthly  yet  not  unreal.     In  "Sister  Songs"  its 
expression  is  intricate  and  elaborate  beyond 
description;  in  "The  Poppy"  it  is  of  a  mar-     Lov™Po°etey. 
vellous  simplicity.     The  touching  effect  which 
he  gains  from  the  mingled  themes  of  childhood  and  love, 


440  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

he  draws  still  more  poignantly  from  those  of  childhood 
and  death  in  "  To  Monica  Thought  Dying."  To  Thomp- 
son as  to  his  predecessors,  Vaughn  and  Blake,  childhood 
is  a  mystery  and  a  miracle  far  beyond  woman. 

If  Robert  Bridges  is  to  be  described  as  a  belated  Eliza- 
bethan, Francis  Thompson  may  be  called  a  child  of  the 
early  seventeenth  century.     Like  the  group 
EMM8011'8      °*  Poets  wm'cn  included  Vaughn  and  Crashaw 
withVe          he  made  religion  a  grfcat-ealbject  of  his  verse, 

CenhSenth     and  like  them  he  wrotV°f   the   ^Gmes  of 
divine  and  human  love,  of  birth  and  of  death, 

sometimes  with  an  intimate  simplicity  as  of  a  child, 
and  again  with  the  strange  and  ardent  subtlety  of  the 
philosopher.  And  like  them  he  brought  to  the  expression 
of  these  mysteries  profound  intellectual  concepts,  and  a 
language  much  of  it  new  to  the  uses  of  poetry.  But  as 
with  these  poets  at  their  best,  this  intellectual  quality, 
this  freighted  language,  does  not  exclude  feeling,  but  is 
infused  with  it,  sublimated  into  rare  and  new  forms  of 
beauty. 

The  group  of  poets  who  probably  mean  most  for  the 
future  of  English  poetry  is  that  of  the  realists — those  who 

have  most  successfully  accommodated  the 
^^  forms  of  verse  to  the  treatment  of  present 

Henley.  reality.     The  first  of  these  in  point  of  time 

is  William  Ernest  Henley  (1849-1903).  Hen- 
ley was  a  journalist  and  editor  during  many  years  when 
the  new  poetry  could  not  obtain  a  hearing.  As  early  as 
1874,  when  an  inmate  of  the  Edinburgh  hospital,  he  wrote 
a  series  of  sketches  in  verse,  which  were  published  in  The 
Cornhill  Magazine.  The  experience  of  the  patient  as  he 
passes  under  the  anaesthetic,  awakes  in  the  clinic,  and 
afterward  lies  on  his  bed  of  insomnia;  his  observation 
of  figures  around  him  and  of  the  life  of  the  hospital  as  it 
unfolds  itself,  are  recorded  with  unflinching  realism.  The 
sketches  are  in  various  forms,  from  the  sonnet  to  un- 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  441 

rhymed  rhythms.  Later  Henley  wrote  much  verse  in 
imitation  of  old  French  forms;  but  his  true  vehicle  was 
the  unrhymed,  irregular,  though  rhythmical  ode,  ap- 
proaching the  free  verse  of  the  present  day,  in  which  he 
wrote  his  realistic  observations  of  city  life  called  "Lon- 
don Voluntaries."  His  first  volume  of  poetry  appeared 
in  1888,  and  his  significant  popularity  belongs  to  the, 
last  decade  of  the  century.  -*jj 

Henley  as  a  critic  relninds  one  of  Hazlitt  in  his  strong- 
personal  attitude  a»d  downright,  defiant  expression  of  it.. 
His  friendship  with  Stevenson,  which  began 
in  the  Edinburgh  Hospital,  is  one  of  the 
beautiful  episodes  of  his  life,  but  he  came  to 
resent  bitterly  his  friend's  later  pietism  and  what  he 
thought  the  unworthy  popularity  which  it  brought  him. 
His  criticism  of  Stevenson  after  the  latter's  death  was 
ill  judged  and  in  bad  taste,  but  it  was  part  of  Henley's 
zeal  for  the  real  and  his  contempt  for  the  conventional. 
In  the  same  spirit  he  has  given  expression  to  the  neo- 
stoic  mood  of  the  close  of  the  century  in  his  best-known 
poem,  Invictus: 

Out  of  the  night  that  covers  me, 
Black  as  the  pit  from  pole  to  pole, 

I  thank  whatever  gods  may  be 
For  my  unconquerable  soul. 

This  personal  mood  finds  easy  transition  to  the  national 
mood  of  militarism.  Henley's  second  volume  of  verse 
(1892)  was(  called  from  its  title  poem  The  Song  of  the 
Sword,  and 'later  during  the  Boer  War  he  was  one  of  the 
most  ardent  imperialists.  As  editor  of  The  National  Ob- 
server he  published  the  early  poems  of  the  later  poet  of 
imperialism — the  Barrack-Room  Ballads  of  Rudyard  Kip- 
ling. 

John  Davidson  (1857-1909),  like  Henley,  had  a  long 
struggle  for  recognition.     He  began  his  career  in  Scotland 


442  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

by  writing  plays;  then  in  1890  he  migrated  to  London, 

and  published  two  novels.     His  first  success  came  with 

Fleet  Street  Eclogues  (1893),  a  series  of  con- 

JP1"1.  versations  in  verse  in  which  as  speakers  the 

Davidson.  .          . 

conventional  pastoral  figures  are  replaced 
by  journalists.  He  followed  this  with  Ballads  and  Songs 
(1894),  New  Ballads  (1896),  and  several  additional  vol- 
umes. He  continued  to  work  for  the  stage  without 
marked  success.  He  died,  probably  by  suicide,  in 
1909. 

Davidson's  poetry  contains  elements  both  of  the  tra- 
ditional and  the  modern.  "Old  and  new,"  he  says,  are 
ever  "weltering  upon  the  borders  of  my 
world."  For  example,  in  "The  Ballad  of  'a 
Nun,"  he  tells  the  mediaeval  story  of  the  nun 
-who  deserted  her  convent  and  returned  after  years  to 
find  that  the  Virgin  Mary  has  guarded  her  place — tells 
it  with  cruel  realism  and  with  its  meaning  changed  from 
praise  of  asceticism  to  glorification  of  experience.  In  the 
same  way  the  story  of  the  knight  who,  sharing  the  joys 
of  Venus,  is  pardoned  by  the  Pope  on  the  sign  of  the  staff 
bursting  into  bloom,  becomes  a  justification  of  license. 
This  deliberate  turning  of  Christian  legend  into  paganism 
is  characteristic  of  the  spirit  of  revolt  in  which  Davidson 
did  his  work.  He  is  bitterly  anti-Christian.  His  "Exo- 
dus from  Houndsditch"  is  a  deliberate  arraignment  of 
Christianity  for  its  social  failure.  He  is  a  convinced 
materialist.  The  soul  for  him  is  matter  become  self- 
conscious,  chiefly  through  pain.  The  whole  world  proc- 
ess is  toward  the  experience  of  more  intense  pain. 

The  lowest  struggling  motion  and  the  fiercest  blood  on  fire, 
The  tree,  the  flower,  are  pressing  towards  a  future  ever  higher, 
To  reach  the  mood  august  wherein  we  know  we  suffer  pain. 

Such  is  his  interpretation  of  the  evolutionary  process  in 
answer  to  Tennyson's.     The  contrast  between  the  great 


CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE  443 

Victorian  poet  and  this  modern  spirit  may  be  further  seen 
by  comparing  their  accounts  of  the  growth  of  a  poet's 
mind,  Tennyson's  " Palace  of  Art"  with  Davidson's 
"Ballad  in  Blank  Verse." 

For  the  rest,  Davidson  deals  in  strong  contrasts  both 
of  form  and  substance.  Mediaeval  legend  and  modern 
industrialism  mingle  in  his  pages;  the  crude 
facts  of  city  life  with  memories  of  nature;  con-  contrasts'8 
ventional  lines,  feeble  and  trite,  with  daring 
innovation.  In  "To  a  Street  Piano"  he  takes,  perhaps 
in  a  spirit  of  defiance,  the  most  insistent  of  all  the  ugli- 
ness of  life — the  vulgar  tunes  that  sing  themselves  in 
our  minds, — and  weaves  them  into  a  strain  of  beauty. 
Perhaps  his  most  dignified  individual  work  is  in  the  dra- 
matic monologues  in  blank  verse,  which  he  calls  "The 
Testament  of  a  Vivisector,"  "The  Testament  of  an  Em- 
pire Builder,"  etc.,  in  which  he  followed  the  example  of 
Browning,  putting  the  criticism  of  contemporary  life  into 
the  mouths  of  its  representatives. 

Of  the  many  poets  active  in  our  own  day  it  may  not 
be  invidious  to  single  out  John  Masefield  as  of  special 
significance  in  representing  in  striking  fashion 
the  approach  of  poetry  to  real  life.  Mase-  Masefield. 
field  was  born  in  1874.  He  ran  away  to  sea, 
and  was  for  some  years  thereafter  at  close  quarters  with 
life.  The  fruits  of  this  grim  experience  appear  in  stories 
and  poems,  most  important  of  the  latter  being  The  Ever- 
lasting Mercy  (1912),  The  Widow  in  the  Bye-Street  (1912), 
and  Dauber  (1912).  These  are  all  narrative  poems,  the 
last  being  the  story  of  a  painter  who  shipped  on  a  sailing 
vessel,  hoping  to  find  opportunity  and  inspiration  to  prac- 
tise his  art.  The  account  of  his  sufferings  and  death,  in 
a  situation  utterly  at  variance  with  his  temperament,  is 
one  of  the  most  vivid  realizations  of  life  at  sea  that  Eng- 
lish literature  holds.  In  the  cruelty  of  its  realism  it  re- 
minds one  of  Smollett,  and  in  its  art  of  Stevenson.  The 


444  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

style  of  these  narrative  poems  is  of  the  simplest,  reflect- 
ing the  elemental  qualities  of  life  engaged. 

Besides  these  narrative  forms  Masefield  has  written  a 
number  of  dramatic  poems.  In  Philip  the  King  (1915)  the 
tragedy  is  that  of  the  King  of  Spain,  who  is 
Masefieid's  confronted  with  the  failure  of  his  life  work 
and  the  ruin  of  his  people.  The  poet  has 
tried  to  enlarge  his  canvas  as  well  as  to  spiri- 
tualize his  tragedy  by  introducing  the  ghosts  of  the 
King's  crimes  and  mistakes,  somewhat  like  the  abstract 
forces  in  Hardy's  Dynasts.  Good  Friday  is  a  dramatic 
poem  based  on  the  crucifixion,  with  Pilate  and  his  wife 
Procula  as  the  chief  characters.  Besides  these,  Masefield 
has  written  one  prose  play  of  the  deepest  power  and  in- 
tensity, The  Tragedy  of  Nan  (1909). 

FICTION 

The  immense  increase  in  the  production  of  reading- 
matter  during  the  last  generation  has  shown  itself  no- 
where more  conspicuously  than  in  fiction,  for  fiction  has 
continued  to  be  the  most  favored  form  of  expression  with 
the  public.  But  it  is  to  be  noted  that  among  the  great 
number  of  novelists  who  have  been  active  since  the 
eighteen  nineties,  very  few  have  continued  in  vogue  more 
than  a  few  years.  For  convenience  in  treatment  the 
same  division  may  be  made  as  in  the  case  of  the  poets, 
between  those  who  tend  to  work  in  the  tradition  of  the 
past,  and  those  who  manifest  the  greater  freedom  of 
form  and  wider  range  of  subject-matter  which  may  be 
thought  characteristic  of  the  future. 

Of  the  first  group  the  most  important  is  Henry  James 

(1843-1916).     James  was  born  in  New  York,  and  spent 

his  early  life  in  Cambridge,  Mass.,  but  his 

James.  maturity  he  lived  almost  entirely  in  England, 

and  his  associations  and  ideals  were  those  of 

Europe  rather  than  America.     He  began  his  career  with 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  445 

essays  and  stories,  publishing  his  first  novel,  Roderick 
Hudson,  in  1875.  This  book  dealt  with  a  problem  which 
came  naturally  to  James,  and  which  he  made  peculiarly 
his  own — that  of  a  young  American  brought  into  contact 
with  the  richer  culture  and  more  exacting  civilization  of 
Europe.  This  was  the  problem,  also,  of  The  American 
(1877)  and  Daisy  Miller  (1878).  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady 
(1881)  is  the  finest  of  his  earlier  works.  Here  a  young 
American  girl,  infatuated  by  the  background  of  Florence, 
marries  an  English  resident  of  that  city — and  once  more 
James  allows  the  problem  of  two  civilizations  to  develop 
itself.  The  Tragic  Muse  (1890)  deals  with  another  prob- 
lem, the  opposition  between  the  call  of  art  and  that  of 
success  in  life  through  politics  and  family  influence; 
and  The  Awkward  Age  (1898)  with  a  still  more  subtle 
situation  growing  out  of  the  presence  of  a  young  girl  in 
the  midst  of  a  corrupt  social  environment.  Similar  per- 
sonal problems  form  the  core  of  later  novels,  The  Wings 
of  a  Dove  (1902),  The  Golden  Bowl  (1906),  The  Outcry 
(1911),  among  which  it  may  be  noted  that  The  Ambassa- 
dors (1905),  his  later  masterpiece,  returns  to  the  case  of 
the  young  American,  a  victim  to  the  charms  of  Paris, 
whose  family  arrive  like  ambassadors  from  the  new  world 
to  negotiate  for  his  deliverance. 

Henry  James  belongs  with  Meredith  and  Stevenson 
as  one  of  the  group  who  have  raised  the  English  novel  to 
the  highest  point  of  technical  perfection.  He  James,s  ^ 
was  in  close  contact  with  literary  movements 
on  the  Continent,  particularly  in  France,  and  wrote  much 
admirable  criticism  contained  in  French  Poets  and  Novel- 
ists (1878),  and  Partial  Portraits  (1888),  some  of  the 
most  significant  of  which  bore  directly  on  the  art  of 
fiction.  He,  like  Meredith,  chose  his  material  from  the 
walks  of  life  where  consciousness  is  most  acute,  and,  un- 
like a  prominent  school  of  realists,  he  believed  in  psycho- 
logical analysis  of  characters  by  the  novelist.  Accord- 


446  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ingly.  his  novels  lack  external  action.  It  is  to  be  said, 
however,  that  when  James's  carefully  developed  situ- 
ations come  to  solution,  the  effect  of  his  art  is  to  give  an 
emphasis  that,  as  in  the  case  of  Meredith,  satisfies  the 
reader's  demand  for  dramatic  and  vital  action.  How- 
ever, the  limited  character  of  James's  popular  success  is 
evidence  enough  that  what  the  public  demands  in  fiction 
is  life,  and  that  it  recognizes  life  rather  by  its  material 
and  external  phenomena  than  by  an  art  of  analysis,  how- 
ever subtle  and  true.  Another  drawback  to  James's 
popularity  is  his  style,  which,  like  Meredith's,  is  a  highly 
specialized  instrument  for  its  purpose,  and  in  its  refine- 
ments and  elaborations  made  little  appeal  to  the  reading 
public. 

James's  titles  represent  works  of  very  various  length. 
His  exact  sense  of  artistry,  indeed,  made  him  determine 
his  length  rigidly  by  the  demands  of  his  ma- 
James's  terial  and  the  effect  to  be  produced.     Accord- 

onorter  . 

stones.  ingly,  we  find  James  s  fictions  varying  from 

the  sketch  to  two  volumes.  One  form  which 
he  made  peculiarly  his  own  is  that  of  the  novelette  or 
long  short  story,  in  which  he  treated  problems  of  less 
magnitude  than  in  his  novels.  Among  his  masterpieces 
of  this  form  are  The  Author  of  Beltraffio,  The  Madonna  of 
the  Future,  The  Lesson  of  the  Master,  and  The  Turn  of  the 
Screw. 

Henry  James's  novels  deal  for  the  most  part  with 
problems  which  may  be  said  to  belong  to  the  aesthetics 
Mrs  Hum  °*  life — matters  of  adjustment  to  environ- 
phry  ward,  ment,  and  personal  development  within  it. 
The  problems  of  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  (1851) 
novels  are  mainly  of  the  old-fashioned  sort— ethical  and 
social.  They  are  therefore  less  individual  and  more 
widely  typical  than  those  with  which  James  deals.  They 
represent  the  religious,  moral,  and  political  difficulties 
which  confronted  serious-minded  and  well-intentioned 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  447 

persons  of  the  nineties  and  nineteen  hundreds,  in  distinc- 
tion from  the  frivolous  neopagans  or  selfish  materialists. 
This  fact  sufficiently  accounts  for  their  enormous  though 
transitory  popularity. 

The  first  of  Mrs.  Ward's  novels,  Robert  Elsmere  (1888), 
deals  with  the  problem  left  by  the  Oxford  Movement — 
that  of  an  immensely  quickened  spiritual  life 
trying  to  find  support  in  Christianity,  in  the 
face  of  scientific  denial  of  the  authority  on 
which  that  faith  has  been  supposed  to  rest.  Mrs.  Ward 
was  a  niece  of  Matthew  Arnold,  and  it  is  easy  to  see  in 
her  first  book  a  treatment  in  fiction  of  the  religious  ques- 
tions which  Arnold  had  presented  in  Literature  and 
Dogma.  Her  second  story,  David  Grieve  (1892),  enlarged 
the  problem  by  considering  in  addition  to  the  intellectual, 
the  moral  difficulties  of  man's  life  in  this  time  of  uncer- 
tainty. Marcella  (1894)  and  Sir  George  Tressady  (1896) 
advanced  to  the  consideration  of  the  organization  of 
society  in  the  presence  of  class  warfare.  In  Helbeck  of 
Bannisdale  (1898)  Mrs.  Ward  returned  to  the  religious 
question,  as  rendered  acute  by  the  Roman  Catholic  re- 
vival. 

Mrs.  Ward,  like  George  Eliot,  lived  in  contact  with 
the  conventional  intellectual  society  of  the  time,  and 
much  of  her  material  is  doubtless  the  au- 
thentic product  of  the  thought  and  conver-  iJjJr  Work* 
sation  of  this  world.  Her  earlier  works  have, 
therefore,  the  value  of  social  documents.  Like  Charles 
Kingsley,  she  believed  in  the  cooperation  of  different 
schools  of  thought  and  classes  of  society;  she  always  pre- 
sents a  benevolent  aristocracy  of  intellect  or  wealth  ready 
to  cooperate  with  an  earnest  and  aspiring  proletariat. 
In  her  later  books,  however,  she  relied  for  material 
less  on  contact  with  people  and  more  on  literature.  For 
example,  in  Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (1903)  and  The  Mar- 
riage of  William  A  she  (1905)  she  has  transposed  actuai 


448  A  HISTORY  OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

well-known  cases  into  fiction,  somewhat  as  George  Mer- 
edith has  done  in  Diana  of  the  Cross-ways. 

The  effect  of  realism  on  the  historical  novel  is  best 
seen  in  the  work  of  Maurice  Henry  Hewlett  (1861).     His 
first  success,  The  Forest  Lovers  (1898),  is  of 
Hewlett  rather  flimsy  tissue,  but  it  was  followed  by 

Richard  Yea  and  Nay  (1900)  and  The  Queen's 
Quhair  (1904),  in  which  he  revived  those  outworn  figures 
of  romance,  Richard  Cceur-de-Lion  and  Mary  Queen  of 
Scots  by  touches  of  true  psychology  and  historical  sociol- 
ogy. Little  Novels  of  Italy  (1899)  is  a  remarkable  re- 
creation of  mediaeval  society  in  the  old  form  of  the  Ital- 
ian novella.  In  his  later  work  Hewlett  has  committed 
himself  to  a  reading  of  modern  life  in  terms  of  romance 
furnished  by  John  Senhouse,  who  is  the  dominating  char- 
acter of  the  trilogy,  Half  Way  House  (1908),  Open  Coun- 
try (1909),  and  Rest  Harrow  (1910). 

A  further  example  of  the  union  between  romanticism 
and  realism  in  fiction  is  furnished  by  Rudyard  Kipling 
(1865).  Kipling  was  born  in  India  and  began 
l"s  career  as  a  newspaper  writer  there,  an 
experience  which  put  him  in  possession  of  a 
vast  amount  of  material  which  appealed  to  the  body  of 
English  readers  as  a  storehouse  of  romance,  but  which 
the  author  controlled  with  the  detailed  knowledge  of  the 
realist.  His  first  literary  success  was  the  result  of  his 
short  stories  of  army,  civilian,  and  native  life  in  India, 
many  of  them  originally  published  in  Indian  newspapers 
and  collected  between  1887  and  1889,  under  the  titles, 
Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills,  Forty  Tales  from  the  Hills, 
Soldiers  Three,  and  The  Phantom  Rickshaw.  There  fol- 
lowed the  collections  called  Life's  Handicap  (1891),  Many 
Inventions  (1893),  The  Day's  Work  (1898),  and  Actions 
and  Reactions  (1909). 

Kipling  understood  thoroughly  the  art  of  the  short 
story— that  of  concentration  upon  a  total  effect  which 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  449 

distinguishes  the  modern  short  story  from  the  old-fash- 
ioned tale.  His  sketches  of  Indian  life  are  single  to  their 
purpose,  brief  and  vivid  as  flashes  of  light- 
ning. Their  appeal  is  romantic  by  virtue  of  Kipling's  Art 
their  remote  material,  stirring  the  imagination  short  story, 
by  all  that  is  strange  and  haunting.  For 
instance,  "The  Strange  Ride  of  Morrowby  Jukes"  and 
"The  Mark  of  the  Beast"  surpass  in  horror  the  gothic 
effects  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  at  the  same  time 
they  are  told  with  the  calm  precision  of  the  realist. 
Moreover,  Kipling's  range  of  effects  in  these  tales  is  enor- 
mous— horror  in  the  two  just  mentioned;  pathos  of  child- 
hood in  "The  Story  of  Muhammad  Din,"  and  of  love  in 
"Without  Benefit  of  Clergy";  humor  in  "My  Lord  the 
Elephant";  satiric  comedy  in  "Cupid's  Arrows."  In  the 
short  stories  which  succeeded,  Kipling  enlarged  his  model, 
always,  however,  maintaining  the  complete  unity  of  his  ef- 
fect. In  "  The  Brushwood  Boy"  (The  Day's  Work,  1898) 
he  entered  the  realm  of  spirit  life,  in  "The  Maltese  Cat" 
(The  Day's  Work),  that  of  animal  psychology,  in  "With 
the  Night  Mail"  (Actions  and  Reactions,  1909)  he  gives 
an  imaginatively  real  account  of  future  communication 
by  aviation.  One  theme  he  has  made  peculiarly  his  own 
— that  of  human  effort,  the  intensity  of  man's  toil,  the 
courage  of  his  defiance  of  the  elements,  his  miraculous 
achievements.  In  the  stories  of  The  Day's  Work  and  in 
Captains  Courageous  (1897)  he  has  wrought  the  neostoic 
theme  of  human  endurance  imperishably  into  fiction. 

Kipling's  longer  stories,  which  approach  the  novel  in 
scope,  are  less  distinguished  for  excellence  in  their  field. 
His  most  successful  work  of  larger  dimension 
is  done  in  such  books  as  Captains  Courageous         Sn^'* 
and  Kim  (1901),  in  which  theme,  background,          stories, 
and  characters  are  maintained  through  a  suc- 
cession  of   episodes   without   close   connection   in   plot. 
Such  are  his  books  for  children— The  Jungle  Books  (1894, 


450  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

1895),  those  wonderfully  penetrating  excursions  of  the 
imagination  into  the  field  of  animal  life. 

Kipling's  early  fame  rested  as  much  on  his  poetry  as 
on  his  stories.  His  Departmental  Ditties  (1886)  and  Bar- 
rack-Room Ballads  (1892)  gave  in  simple  verse 
tne  characters  and  characteristics  of  army 
life  in  India.  In  them  and  in  the  army  tales 
Kipling  created  the  modern  British  soldier  as  a  figure  in 
literature — and  the  value  of  his  performance  can  be  tested 
by  comparing  his  pictures  of  military  life  with  those  of 
earlier  military  novelists,  such  as  Charles  Lever.  Later, 
in  The  Seven  Seas  (1896)  and  The  Five  Nations  (1903),  he 
made  himself  the  poet  of  imperialism,  of  the  larger  con- 
ception of  the  Anglo-Saxon's  place  and  function  in  the 
world  that  came  to  replace  the  insular  patriotism  of  earlier 
national  poets.  In  his  poems,  in  his  stories,  and  in  his 
journalism,  based  on  travel  or  residence  in  every  part  of 
the  British  dominion,  Kipling  became  an  important  force 
in  the  creation  of  that  imperial  self-consciousness  in  which 
the  communities  of  Anglo-Saxon  blood  have  drawn  nearer 
together,  and  he  has  uttered  the  popular  political  philos- 
ophy of  the  time,  for  example,  in  "The  White  Man's  Bur- 
den." Necessarily  much  of  Kipling's  imperial  verse  con- 
cerns the  sea,  the  soil  in  which  Britain's  colonies  have 
grown  into  empire.  It  is  interesting  to  see  how  the  old 
themes  of  wandering  by  far  ocean  trails  and  seeking 
strange  adventures,  which  we  see  in  Anglo-Saxon  poetry, 
continue  to  animate  this  latest  English  poet,  and  how 
much  they  contribute  to  his  conception  of  racial  character 
and  destiny. 

It  is  not,  however,  as  a  political  but  as  a  human  poet 
that  Kipling  will  be  best  remembered.  He  has  mingled 
Kipling's  P°etry  freely  with  his  prose,  as  head-notes  to 
Humanity.  ms  stories  or  interludes  among  them,  in  a 
manner  almost  Elizabethan,  and  with  strik- 
ing reinforcement  to  his  themes.  In  these  Songs  from 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  451 

Books  is  distilled  the  essential  humanity  that  is  mani- 
fested in  so  many  new  and  marvellous  forms  throughout 
his  fiction.  One  illustration  will  make  clear  this  quality 
of  Kipling,  "For  to  Admire  and  for  to  See,"  in  which  the 
human  inarticulateness  of  the  waif  appears,  in  contrast 
to  the  poems  which  set  forth  the  proud  assurance  of  a 
dominating  race. 

.  I  see  the  sargeants  pitching  quoits, 
I  'ear  the  women  laugh  and  talk, 
I  spy  upon  the  quarter  deck 
The  orficers  and  ladies  walk. 
I  thinks  about  the  things  that  was, 
An'  leans  an'  looks  acrost  the  sea 
Till  spite  of  all  the  crowded  ship, 
There's  no  one  left  alive  but  me. 

Another  example  of  romance  fed  by  adventure  in  re- 
mote parts  of  the  world  is  afforded  by  Joseph  Conrad 
(1857).  Conrad  was  born  in  Poland,  and 
spent  his  early  life  on  the  sea.  He  became 
by  choice  a  writer  of  English  rather  than 
French,  which  he  considered  using,  and  began  to  turn 
into  fiction  the  material  acquired  in  his  wandering  life, 
especially  in  the  tropics.  His  first  important  book,  Lord 
Jim  (1000),  was  followed  by  Youth  (1902),  and  Typhoon 
(1903).  Then  after  a  period  of  miscellaneous  work  he 
returned  to  his  true  field  of  adventure  by  sea  in  Chance 
(1913)  and  Victory  (1915). 

Conrad's  stories  are  distinguished  for  certain  qualities 
of  narrative  art,  notably  a  tendency,  somewhat  like 
Meredith's  and  James's,  to  postpone  the 
crisis  and  defeat  expectation.  The  result  is 
to  accumulate  the  force  of  the  situation  in  a 
total  effect  of  explosive  intensity.  This  is  a  feature  of 
the  art  of  the  short  story  which  has  been  adopted  by  the 
novelist,  and  in  Conrad's  case  with  extraordinary  suc- 
cess. Again,  he  deals  with  character  of  a  powerful  and 


452  A   HISTORY   OF    ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

bizarre  originality,  tested  by  strange  conditions  and  novel 
adventure.  Above  all,  he  handles  scene  with  wonderful 
effect,  to  create  that  surrounding  and  penetrating  medium 
for  such  experience  which  we  call  atmosphere.  Victory, 
in  its  slow  arranging  of  circumstances  and  human  forces, 
its  prolonged  tension  of  the  situation,  and  its  final  sur- 
prising and  total  catastrophe,  is  a  typical  example  of 
Conrad's  art  in  his  longer  work.  "The  Heart  of  Dark- 
ness" (the  second  story  in  the  volume  Youth}  is  a  magnifi- 
cent study  of  atmosphere  determining  the  unity  and  total 
effect  of  the  short  story.  The  heavy  tropical  air  of 
equatorial  Africa  broods  like  a  miasma  over  the  mon- 
strous and  uncouth  works  of  nature,  drawing  humanity 
itself  into  similar  forms  of  atrocious  extravagance. 

In  the  fiction  and  drama  of  social  criticism  the  most 
significant  work  of  the  twentieth  century  has  been  done 
by  Arnold  Bennett  (1867),  Herbert  George  Wells  (1866), 
John  Galsworthy  (1867),  and  George  Bernard  Shaw 
(1856).  Before  speaking  of  them,  however,  mention 
should  be  made  of  Samuel  Butler  (1835-1902)  as  their 
precursor. 

It  is  fair  to  say  that  when  Samuel  Butler  died  in  1902 
not  one  English  reader  in  a  thousand  knew  of  his  having 
lived.  It  is  only  since  the  publication  of  his 
Butler!  posthumous  novel,  The  Way  of  Att  Flesh 

(1903),  and  especially  since  the  recognition  of 
his  importance  by  Shaw  and  others,  that  he  has  been 
elevated  into  a  commanding  position  among  the  writers 
of  social  fiction.  He  was  born  in  1835,  the  son  of  a 
clergyman,  and  as  the  result  of  strong  reaction  against 
the  evangelical  religious  circle  in  which  he  was  brought 
up,  he  emigrated  to  New  South  Wales  in  1857.  Return- 
ing to  London  with  a  modest  fortune,  he  devoted  himself 
to  painting,  music,  scientific  experiment,  and  writing. 
Among  his  earlier  works  are  Erewhon  (1872)  (an  anagram 
for  Nowhere),  a  Utopian  romance,  and  Life  and  Habit 


CONTEMPORARY   LITERATURE  453 

(1877),  a  contribution  to  evolutionary  science.  His  mas- 
terpiece, The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  on  which  he  was  engaged 
some  twenty  years,  was  not  published  until  after  his 
death.  This  work  deals  with  the  life  of  a  boy  and  young 
man  brought  up,  as  was  Butler,  under  conventional  re- 
ligious influences,  and  his  effort  to  shape  for  himself  a 
life  amid  conditions  of  which  he  is  pathetically  ignorant. 
In  its  steadfast  acceptance  of  the  realities,  its  bold  criti- 
cism of  conventional  morality  and  religion  as  guides  to 
life,  and  its  simple  biographical  structure,  it  may  be 
compared  with  George  Moore's  Esther  Waters  as  mark- 
ing the  new  era  in  fiction. 

Arnold  Bennett  (1867)  began  his  work  as  a  professional 
purveyor  of  wares  to  the  reading  public.  Only  after  years 
of  apprenticeship  did  he  emerge  as  a  novelist 
of  distinction.  He  took  as  his  field  the  in- 
dustrial region  of  The  Five  Towns,  which 
George  Moore  had  introduced  to  fiction,  and  proceeded 
to  picture  the  limited  lives  of  its  inhabitants  with  a  faith- 
ful naturalism  that  reminds  one  of  the  realists  of  France, 
where  indeed  Bennett  lived  for  many  years.  Into  the 
everlasting  monotony  of  this  environment,  however,  Ben- 
nett introduced  characters  representative  of  natural  ro- 
manticism to  whom  all  life  is  adventure,  Helen  of  the 
High  Hand  and  Denry  the  Audacious,  in  the  books  bear- 
ing their  names.  It  is  as  if  Bennett  would  have  us 
understand  that  the  difference  between  realism  and  ro- 
manticism is  that  of  temperament  and  attitude  toward 
life. 

Bennett's  first  widely  successful  novel  was  The  Old 
Wives'  Tale  (1908),  in  which  he  combines  the  two  threads 
of  realism  and  romance  by  following  the  ca- 
reers of  two  sisters — Constance,   who  stays         Novefs.  S 
faithfully  in  her  shopkeeping  routine  at  Burs- 
ley,  and  Sophia,  who  elopes  into  the  more  spacious  career 
of  a  pension  keeper  in  Paris..    In  the  trilogy,  Clay  hanger 


454  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLJSH   LITERATURE 

(1910),  Hilda  Lessways  (1911),  and  These  Twain  (1914), 
he  again  associates  two  characters  of  the  same  opposite 
tendency,  the  faithful  realist,  Edwin,  and  the  romanticist, 
Hilda,  whose  interrupted  love-story  and  subsequent  mar- 
riage are  narrated  from  both  points  of  view.  As  a  trans- 
mutation of  every-day  life  into  fantasy,  Bennett  has  never 
excelled  the  skit  Buried  Alive  (1908),  in  which  the  almost 
supernatural  experience  of  a  man  surviving  himself,  at- 
tending his  funeral,  and  enjoying  his  posthumous  fame  is 
brought  about  by  the  most  natural  means,  and  sustained 
through  the  most  ordinary  environment  and  incidents. 

Bennett's  social  criticism  may  be  regarded  as  incidental 
to  his  main  purpose,  implicit  rather  than  explicit,  histori- 
cal rather  than  analytic.  He  presents  in  long 
perspective  the  dull  materialism,  hypocrisy, 
Criticism.  and  conventionality  of  Victorian  provincial- 
ism as  seen  in  the  survivals  of  it  in  The  Five 
Towns— Darius  Clayhanger  and  Auntie  Hamps  in  the 
trilogy.  Like  Butler,  he  is  severe  in  his  picture  of  evan- 
gelical religion,  and  like  Wells,  he  represents  the  shams 
and  shortcomings  of  education  and  of  civilization,  both 
social  and  domestic,  but  he  does  this  with  the  detachment 
of  the  historian,  not  the  ardor  of  the  reformer.  One  of 
his  plays,  Milestones,  is  an  example  of  this  social  criticism 
involved  in  the  mere  record  of  changes  in  the  individual 
wrought  by  the  passing  of  time. 

John  Galsworthy  (1867)  is  a  subtler  artist  and  more 
penetrating  critic  of  life  than  Arnold  Bennett.  Like  Ben- 
John  nett'  ^e  rec°Snizes  the  shiftless  arrangements 
Galsworthy,  which  mankind  has  made  for  its  inhabitation 
of  the  earth,  physically  and  spiritually,  and 
which^at  their  best  go  under  the  name  of  civilization, 
but  his  satire  is  unconcealed,  as  is  his  sympathy.  Gals- 
worthy recognizes  class  distinction  as  the  cardinal  fact 
in  the  edifice  of  society.  His  novels  are  chiefly  occupied 
with  the  effect  of  a  class  On  its  members,  or  with  the 


CONTEMPORARY   LITERATURE  455 

inevitable  opposition  of  classes.  The  Man  of  Property 
(1906)  deals  with  the  prosperous  middle  class,  with  its 
mind,  its  heart,  and  its  conscience  rooted  in  the  idea  of 
individual  ownership.  The  Country  House  (1907)  pre- 
sents the  lower,  and  The  Patrician  (1911)  the  higher 
aristocracy,  with  their  class  consciousness  growing  out  of 
possession  and  position.  Fraternity  (1909)  shows  the 
pathetic  impotence  of  human  will  to  break  through  the 
barriers  of  class;  and  The  Freelands  (1915),  the  tragic  con- 
sequences of  the  blindness  of  the  so-called  intelligent  class 
to  the  point  of  view  of  the  other.  These  themes  Gals- 
worthy has  treated  in  drama  also,  the  tragedy  of  a  help- 
less lower  class  in  The  Silver  Box  (1906)  and  Justice 
(1910),  and  the  futility  of  class  warfare  in  Strife  (1909). 
In  all  English  fiction  class  has  played  an  important 
part;  from  the  time  of  Pamela  the  novelist  has  shown 
us  individual  virtue  or  passion  breaking  its 
boundaries.  The  promotion  of  a  character  g^JJorthy's 
from  a  lower  to  a  higher  class  by  discovery  criticism, 
of  birth  or  by  marriage  has  been  a  romantic 
motive  constantly  in  use.  Galsworthy,  however,  takes 
the  fact  of  class  much  more  seriously  and  scientifically. 
The  rewards  and  the  penalties  of  life  are  granted  strictly 
within  the  limits  defined  by  social  distinctions.  One  situ- 
ation that  arises  peculiarly  out  of  class  consciousness  is 
scandal,  and  this  Galsworthy  uses  in  nearly  all  of  his 
novels  as  a  test  of  character.  There  is  scandal  in  The 
Country  House,  the  consequences  of  which  Mrs.  Pendyce 
averts  from  her  family  by  acting  according  to  her  class 
instinct  of  an  English  lady,  made  strong  out  of  her  very 
weakness;  and  there  is  scandal  in  The  Man  of  Property, 
the  threat  of  which  drives  Solmes  Forsyte  into  a  mad 
fury  of  possession— the  only  relation  in  life  which  is  clear 
to  him.  There  is  scandal  impending  in  Fraternity,  be- 
tween Hilary  Dallison  and  the  little  model,  but  it  cannot 
leap  the  barrier  of  class.  On  all  who  seek  to  pass  beyond 


456  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  bounds  of  class,  whether  they  succeed  or  fail,  there 
rests  the  curse  of  futility— upon  young  Jolyon  Forsyte  in 
The  Man  of  Property,  upon  old  Mr.  Stone  in  Fraternity, 
and  upon  the  young  Freelands. 

Galsworthy  is  a  realist,  both  minute  and  delicate.  For 
example,  in  Fraternity,  the  sense  of  smell  is  one  factor 
that  restricts  the  human  approach  of  the 
upper  class  toward  the  lower  to  a  remote 
philanthropy;  but  the  ways  in  which  indi- 
viduals react  to  this  element  are  subtly  differentiated. 
Moreover,  he  relieves  the  effect  of  detail  by  giving  it 
symbolic  meaning,  spiritual  or  social,  beyond  the  fact 
itself.  Even  various  ''properties"  of  his  characters  serve 
to  suggest  or  distinguish  qualities  or  attitudes  too  delicate 
for  phrasing.  In  this  faculty  Galsworthy  suggests  the 
deftness  of  Sterne  and  the  spiritual  penetration  of  Maeter- 
linck. 

On  the  whole,  Galsworthy's  view  of  mankind  is  pessi- 
mistic.    In  spite  of  ideal  and  heroic  examples,  his  general 
conclusion  is  of  the  inadequacy  of  man  to 
Georgf  k*8  situation-     Society  is  a  morass,  in  which 

Weils.  human  life  sinks  as  sank  the  gigantic  animals 

of  the  sloth  family  in  their  primeval  slime. 
The  first  difference  between  him  and  Herbert  George 
Wells  (1866)  is  the  hopefulness  of  the  latter  in  regard  to 
improvement  of  relations  between  man  and  his  environ- 
ment. Wells  was  born  of  the  lower  middle  class.  He 
obtained  the  really  valuable  part  of  his  training  in  the 
Royal  College  of  Science,  and  later  in  sociological  inves- 
tigation. It  was  owing  to  a  temporary  period  of  ill 
health  that  he  began  the  writing  of  fantastic  romances 
based  on  imaginary  developments  of  physical  science, 
such  as  The  Time  Machine  (1895)  and  The  War  of  the 
Worlds  (1898).  He  extended  his  field  to  serious  sociologi- 
cal essays,  as  in  Anticipations  (1901),  A  Modern  Utopia 
(1905),  New  Worlds  for  Old  (1908),  and  First  and  Last 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  457 

Things  (1908).  He  began  seriously  to  write  novels  with 
Kipps  (1905),  a  treatment  of  Galsworthy's  theme  of  the 
difficulty  of  changing  from  one  social  class  to  another, 
done  with  the  broad  humor  that  Dickens  would  have 
employed.  He  continued  the  study  of  middle-class  life 
in  the  same  caricaturistic  style  in  Tono  Bungay  (1909) 
and  Mr.  Polly  (1910).  In  Anne  Veronica  (1909)  he  ap- 
proached the  theme  of  woman's  place  in  modern  society, 
as  determined  by  education,  politics,  and  love  when 
marriage  is  impossible.  He  continued  to  discuss  the  op- 
position between  passion  and  social  arrangements  in 
The  New  Machiavelli  (1911),  Marriage  (1912),  and  The 
Passionate  Friends  (1913).  It  is  to  be  noted  as  part  of 
his  modernism  that  Wells  will  not  solve  the  difficulty  by 
invoking  the  classical  motive  of  renunciation,  but  devotes 
himself  to  studying  the  social  consequences  to  his  char- 
acters of  acting  in  accordance  with  desire.  One  phase  of 
the  question  which  Wells  considers  in  these  stories  is  the 
relation  of  passion  to  character  and  man's  work  in  the 
world,  and  this  is  the  theme  of  The  Research  Magnificent 
(1914).  It  is  to  be  noted  that  in  this  book  Wells  aban- 
dons the  novel  form  for  loose  narrative  based  on  the 
growth  of  a  character  as  revealed  by  diaries  and  memo- 
randa— somewhat  like  the  device  of  Carlyle  in  Sartor 
Resartus.  In  Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through  (1916)  the 
form  likewise  disappears  before  the  terrible  actuality  of 
the  substance — the  life  of  an  English  family  in  the  first 
year  of  the  great  war.  All  of  Wells's  work  shows  the 
journalistic  quality  of  timeliness;  in  Mr.  Britling  it  seems 
as  if  literature  had  for  once  kept  pace  with  life,  in  its 
vivid,  photographic  reproduction  of  experience. 

Wells  is  a  clear  example  of  the  way  in  which  biology 
and  sociology  have  come  to  replace  history  as  the  back- 
ground of  knowledge  in  man's  thought  of  the  world.  He 
shows  the  effect  of  the  theory  of  evolution  on  ordinary 
thinking.  He  regards  human  life  as  "a  succession  of 


458  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE, 

births,  the  race  like  a  stream  flowing  through  us";  but 
with  this  cosmic  view  he  has  a  definite  conception  of  the 

individuality  of  each  man's  experience.  His 
Weiis's  emphasis  on  this  latter  doctrine  perhaps  ex- 

Criticism,  plains  his  change  of  form  from  the  sociological 

essay  to  the  novel,  which  above  all  deals  with 
the  individual  man  and  woman.  As  has  been  said,  he  is 
an  optimist.  He  believes  in  the  intelligence  and  disinter- 
estedness of  men;  in^4  Modern' Utopia  the  model  society 
is  promoted  by  a  self-chosen  nobility  which  he  calls 
Samurai,  who  devote  themselves  to  its  welfare,  and  The 
Research  Magnificent  is  a  study  of  the  training  of  charac- 
ter into  this  voluntary  aristocracy.  He  is  optimistic  not 
only  in  regard  to  human  nature  but  in  regard  to  its  en- 
vironment. Unlike  Carlyle  and  Ruskin,  he  has  no  hatred 
of  machinery.  His  picture  of  present  society  is  as  dark  as 
theirs,  but  he  believes  that  practical  applications  of  phys- 
ical and  economic  science  will  give  man  a  worldly  habita- 
tion worthy  of  the  possibilities  of  his  nature.  And  in  the 
dark  hours  of  the  catastrophe  of  world  war  he  adds  re- 
ligion to  this  faith,  as  his  last  volume,  The  Invisible  God 
(1917),  bears  witness. 

DRAMA 

One  of  the  most  important  movements  in  the  literature 
of  the  later  nineteenth  century  was  the  revival  of  the 
prose  drama  as  a  serious  form  of  literary  art.  During 
the  early  years  of  the  century  the  theatre  was  given  over 
to  romantic  unreality  or  to  farce,  with  the  exception  of 
occasional  poetic  dramas,  such  as  those  of  Bulwer-Lytton, 
Browning,  and  Tennyson.  Under  the  influence  of  French 
realism  playwrights  tried  rather  timidly  to  deal  with  real 
life,  the  plays  of  Thomas  Robertson  (1829-1871),  Society 
(1865),  Caste  (1867),  and  School  (1869),  being  instances. 
The  Norwegian  dramatist,  Henrik  Ibsen,  whose  studies 
of  commonplace  conditions  embodying  significant  social 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  459 

and  spiritual  issues  reached  the  London  stage  in  the 
eighties,  was  a  powerful  influence  in  this  direction.  Fol- 
lowing him,  English  playwrights,  Henry  Arthur  Jones  and 
Arthur  Wing  Pinero,  proceeded  to  use  the  stage  as  a 
vehicle  for  ideas  and  the  discussion  of  social  problems, 
though  they  continued  to  submit  to  the  conventions  of 
dramatic  technic  embodied  in  the  theory  of  the  "well- 
made  play."  The  truest  introduction  of  reality,  and  the 
boldest  innovation  in  subordinating  the  form  of  the 
drama  to  its  substance,  were  made  by  George  Bernard 
Shaw  (1856). 

Shaw  was  born  in  Ireland,  but  removed  to  London  in 
1876.  He  began  his  career  as  a  novelist,  then  joined  the 
socialist  movement  and,  like  Wells,  devoted 
himself  to  social  propaganda.  He  was  a  critic  George 
of  music,  art,  and  the  theatre,  showing  his  Shaw, 
alertness  to  foreign  influences  by  The  Quin- 
tessence of  Ibsenism  (1891)  and  The  Perfect  Wagnerite 
(1898).  His  first  play,  Widowers'  Houses,  written  in 
1885,  was  not  produced  until  1892,  and  then  with  scant 
success.  He  followed  this  with  The  Philanderer  (1893), 
a  satire  on  the  emancipated  woman,  and  Mrs.  Warren's 
Profession,  a  treatment  of  commercialized  vice  which  was 
refused  performance  by  the  censor.  Arms  and  the  Man 
(1894),  a  brilliant  satire  on  military  glory,  Candida  (1894), 
The  Man  of  Destiny  (1895),  a  mock  heroic  skit  on  Napo- 
leon, and  You  Never  Can  Tell  (1896),  a  farcical  treatment 
of  the  new  woman,  followed.  These  seven  plays  were  all 
distinguished  by  their  attack  upon  some  time-honored 
sham,  their  reduction  to  reality  of  some  pretentiously  false 
view.  Perhaps  because  of  their  slight  success  as  acting 
plays  Shaw  published  them  in  two  series,  Plays  Pleasant 
and  Unpleasant  (1898).  He  made  the  prefaces  to  these 
volumes  elaborate  comments  on  the  technical  and  social 
qualities  of  the  plays,  and  further  to  guide  his  readers, 
he  expanded  the  stage  directions  into  full  descriptions, 


460  A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

character  sketches,  and  explanations,  thus  adapting  the 
play  to  a  public  which  was  accustomed  to  read  novels. 
By  this  campaign  in  behalf  of  the  reading  play  he  helped 
to  raise  prose  drama  again  to  the  status  of  literature. 

Shaw's  later  plays  were  more  immediately  successful 
on  the  stage,  but  he  continued  to  publish  them  as  books, 
and  by  the  aid  of  prefaces  to  make  them  effective  propa- 
ganda of  his  views  on  the  art  of  the  theatre  and  on  society. 
He  attacked  the  illusions  of  history  in  Casar  and  Cleopatra, 
and  of  romantic  morality  in  The  Devil's  Disciple,  published 
in  Three  Plays  for  Puritans  (1900).  In  Man  and  Super- 
man (1903)  he  represented  courtship  as  a  war  of  the 
sexes  and  man  as  the  victim  of  woman,  who  is  the  incarna- 
tion of  nature's  purpose,  and  the  will  to  live.  In  John 
Bull's  Other  Island  (1904)  he  attacked  English  domination 
of  Ireland,  and  made  in  the  preface  a  powerful  arraign- 
ment of  military  rule  in  Egypt.  In  The  Doctor's  Dilemma 
(1906)  he  tilted  against  the  professional  humbug  that 
surrounds  medical  practice,  and  in  Getting  Married  (1908) 
against  that  which  conceals  the  true  relations  of  sex. 
Fanny's  First  Play  (1911)  is  a  satire  on  dramatic  criticism, 
and  Androcles  and  the  Lion,  on  Christian  martyrdom. 

Always  Shaw  carries  out  the  theory  of  the  drama  of 
ideas  by  making  his  play  a  challenge  of  some  received 
opinion,  and  carrying  the  principle  of  dramatic  opposition 
into  the  minds  of  his  audience.  Certain  of  Shaw's  views 
are  strikingly  significant  of  his  time.  For  example,  the 
influence  of  the  new  biological  science  is  seen  in  his  sug- 
gestion of  the  improvement  of  the  race  by  selection.  He 
believes  that  democracy  cannot  be  made  to  work  with 
the  present  human  material,  and  he  distrusts  the  efficacy 
of  the  accidental  hero  who,  in  Carlyle's  view,  periodically 
saves  and  reanimates  human  society.  Shaw  would  have 
society  breed  a  race  of  heroes,  of  supermen.  He  attacks 
poverty  in  the  persons  of  those  weak  members  of  society 
who  accept  it,  and  looks  forward  to  their  extinction  with 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  461 

the  extension  of  a  better  race.  Again,  the  attitude  called 
pragmatism — of  accepting  as  true  only  beliefs  that  will 
work — is  shown  by  his  attack  on  the  idea  of  reform  by 
punishment,  or  of  the  improvement  of  society  by  mar- 
riage and  the  home.  His  realism  appears  in  his  constant 
war  on  the  romantic  view  of  love,  of  morality,  of  human 
character,  historical  or  contemporary.  He  has  a  special 
contempt  for  men  held  fast  by  professional  rules,  as 
doctors  and  soldiers.  Something  of  this  may  be  due  to 
personal  prejudice  and  idiosyncrasy,  much  to  clever 
journalism.  But  we  cannot  deny  to  Shaw  the  power 
which  Swift  possessed,  of  startling  men  out  of  conven- 
tional opinions  into  independent  thought. 

THE  IRISH  LITERARY  MOVEMENT 

Anglo-Irish  literature  had  its  beginning  in  the  early 
days  of  the  nineteenth  century.  But  it  was  not  until 
about  1840  that  there  was  a  definite  move- 
ment for  the  creation  of  an  Irish  culture  in  Movement 
English.  This  movement  was  forwarded  by  for  an  Irish 
Thomas  Davis  and  it  took  its  title  from 
Davis's  newspaper,  The  Nation.  At  the  mo- 
ment the  movement  seemed  promising.  There  were  many 
eloquent  writers  in  prose  and  verse.  Carleton,  the  Ba- 
nims,  and  Gerald  Grifiin  were  the  novelists  of  the  time; 
Mangan,  Ferguson,  Davis,  Walsh,  and  Callanan  were  the 
poets;  Mitchel  and  Davis  were  the  political  and  social 
writers.  At  the  time,  the  Irish  population  was  in  the  main 
Gaelic  or  Irish-speaking.  They  possessed  a  literature  that 
was  very  original  and  very  distinct  from  English,  but 
for  various  reasons  they  were  turning  away  from  their 
own  language.  Then,  while  Davis  and  his  group  were 
working  for  the  creation  of  a  new  culture,  the  double 
famine  of  1846-1847  occurred.  It  destroyed  a  million 
people  and  it  altered  the  whole  life  of  the  country.  Irish 


462  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

culture  had  been  contained  in  manuscripts  and  in  the 
memories  of  peasant  scholars  and  poets.  The  manu- 
scripts were  scattered,  and  the  old  people  who  were  natu- 
rally the  custodians  of  the  traditions  were  swept  away. 
The  new  generation  turned  toward  English.  Schools 
were  established,  and  the  teaching  of  Irish,  or  the  teach- 
ing of  any  subject  through  Irish,  was  not  permitted  in 
them.  The  English  language  now  entered  into  nearly 
every  home  in  Ireland. 

From  the  Nation  period,  when  the  poet  Mangan  worked 
with  the  scholar  O'Donovan  to  produce  versions  of  the 
Irish  bardic  poems,  there  had  been  a  close 
'rtcfiti?®*5    connection  between  Celtic  research  and  Anglo- 
Material  into    Irish    poetry.     The    most    valuable    poetry 
Literature!1      written  in  the  next  forty  years  came  from 
Celtic  originals  or  from  suggestions  in  Celtic 
originals.     Sir  Samuel  Ferguson,  who  survived  from  the 
Nation  days,  treated  the  famous  "Ultonian"  or  "Red 
Branch"  epic  cycle  (the  cycle  that  has  the  hero  Cuchul- 
lain  for  its  central  character)  as  Tennyson  was  treating 
the  Round-Table  cycle,  writing  narrative  or  dramatic  po- 
ems about  the  different  episodes.     He  translated  a  few 
of  the  modern  folk-songs,  bringing  into  English  poetry 
an  unfamiliar  rhythm  in  such  versions  as  those  of  "Cean 
Duv  Deelish"  and  "Cashel  of  Munster,"  poems  that  have 
the  beauty  and  the  spirit  of  the  originals.     Aubrey  de 
Vere  wrote  Catholic  poetry,  but  the  two  poems  by  him 
that  deal  with  Celtic  life  in  Ireland— "Bard  Ethell"  and 
"The  Wedding  of  the   Clans" — represent  his  strongest 
work.     Doctor  Sigerson   made  metrical   translations  of 
Irish  poetry  from  the  eighth  to  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  his  collection  Bard  of  the  Gael  and  Gall  was  an  im- 
portant influence  on  the  new  Irish  poetry. 

The  eighties  was  a  period  of  social  and  internecine  con- 
flict in  Ireland.  What  was  called  the  Land  War— a  des- 
perate struggle  between  popular  organizations  and  the 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  463 

government — was  being  carried  on.  Then  the  nationalist 
population  which  was  fighting  the  government  had  split  on 
the  question  of  Parnell's  leadership  and  formed 
two  bitterly  opposed  factions.  This  quarrel 
filled  the  best  Irish  people  with  despair. 
They  thought  that  while  these  battles  were  being  fought 
out  the  soul  of  Ireland  was  being  destroyed.  And  so 
they  tried  to  form  a  new  organization  that  would  draw 
people  together  in  the  interests  of  Irish  culture.  Their 
aspiration  was  fulfilled  in  an  organization  for  the  spread 
of  the  Irish  language  and  the  creation  in  it  of  a  modern 
literature.  This  was  the  Gaelic  League.  And  it  was 
this  organization  that  provided  a  soil  and  a  shelter  for 
the  new  poetry,  although  this  new  poetry  was  to  be  in 
English. 

In  Irish  literary  circles  three  writers  had  appeared  who 
were  to  stand  for  distinct  ideas — William  Butler  Yeats 
(1865),  George  W.  Russell,  and  Douglas  Hyde. 
Mr.  Yeats  stood  for  personality  in  life  and      jjjjjjjjjj" 
letters;  George  Russell  (known  as  "A.  E."),      writers, 
for  a   spiritual  interpretation   of   the  world; 
Douglas  Hyde,  for  the  "Irish-Ireland"  idea — that  is,  for 
an    Ireland    thinking,    speaking,    and    writing   in    Irish. 
What  is  called  the  "Irish  Revival"  is  due  to  the  work 
and  the  influence  of  these  three  writers  and  to  the  work 
and  the  influence  of  a  fourth,  Standish  O'Grady. 

A  book  published  in  1888  had  contained  "The  Wan- 
derings of  Usheen,"  the  narrative  poem. that  had  at  once 
made    Mr.    Yeats   known.     Based    upon    an 
eighteenth-century    Gaelic    lay    and    dealing      poe'try. 
with  one  of  the  most  charming  and  most  dra- 
matic episodes  in  the  Ossianic  cycle  of  Celtic  romance, 
"The  Wanderings  of  Usheen"  was  the  first  poem  written 
in  English  that  had  the  real  spirit  of  the  middle-Irish 
poetry — passionate  delight  in  the  appearance  of  nature,  in 
strength,  and  in  beauty;   vehement  lamentation  for  the 


464  A  HISTORY   OF   ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

facts  of  decay  and  death.  Other  poems  about  Ireland's 
heroic  period  appeared  in  Mr.  Yeats's  early  books— nota- 
bly the  superb  Death  of  Cuchullain.  But  there  were  also 
poems  of  homely  Irish  life— poems  about  fishers,  fiddlers, 
huntsmen,  and  priests.  It  was  evident  that  a  poet  had 
now  appeared  who  could  give  to  Irish  tradition  and  Irish 
life  a  new  and  subtle  beauty. 

Mr.  Yeats,  with  his  verse  dramas  and  his  lyrics,  has  to 
his  credit  a  more  varied  body  of  poetic  work  than  any 
of  his  contemporaries.     He  begins  with  verse 
The  Signifi-      that  has  a  revolutionary  directness  of  state- 
AcWevem^nl    ment.     In    his    early    poems    there    are    no 
inversions,    no    " poetic"    constructions;    his 
statements  are  as  literal  as  if  they  were  in  prose.     Then, 
still  keeping    to    prose   construction,   his   verse   in    The 
Wind  Among  the  Reeds  (1899)  becomes  more  elaborate  in 
rhythm,  more  aloof  in  its  suggestion.     Writing  for  the 
stage,  his  verse  becomes  again  direct,  not  with  the  di- 
rectness of  written  words,  but  with  the  directness  "of  ac- 
tual speech.     This  directness  of  actual  speech  influences 
his  later  lyrics,  making  them  more  bare  and  direct  than 
prose  passages  written  emotionally.     Mr.  Yeats's  poetic 
achievement  has  been  twofold:  he  brought  back  the  po- 
etic drama  to  the  theatre,  writing  in  The  King's  Thresh- 
old, in  On  Baile's  Strand,  in  Deirdre,  and  in  The  Green 
Helmet,  the  first  dramatic  verse  since  Jacobean  days  that 
was  really  related  to  human  impulse  and  expression  and 
was  not  a  mere  theatre  decoration;   he  took  the  new 
Anglo-Irish   poetry,  with  its   tendency  toward   rhetoric 
and  its  gleams  of  racial  imaginativeness,   and  he  gave 
it  an   aesthetic  form  that  was  to  be  the  greatest  influ- 
ence on  the  next  generation  of   Irish  writers.     The  vol- 
ume of  lyrics,  The  Wind  Among  the  Reeds  and  the  verse 
drama,  The  Shadowy  Waters  (1901)  had  an  esoteric  content 
and  Mr.  Yeats  gained  the  reputation  of  being  the  poet 
of  mysticism.     But  it  is  most  likely  that  he  wrote  this 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  465 

esoteric  verse  from  an  intellectual  impulse  which  urged 
him  to  create  as  the  French  symbolists  were  creating. 
The  Irish  mind  is  not  mystical  but  intellectual,  and  Mr. 
Yeats's  esoteric  poems  show  the  Celtic  interest  in  what 
is  remote  and  cryptic. 

George  W.  Russell,  whose  work  appears  under  the 
monogram  "AE"  is,  in  the  most  profound  sense,  a  mys- 
tic. Like  all  mystics,  he  is  content  to  express 
a  single  idea.  In  all  his  volumes  of  verse,  in 
Homeward,  in  The  Earth  Breath,  in  The  Di- 
vine  Vision,  he  has  put  into  pregnant  verse 
his  all-sufficing  thought.  Men  are  the  strayed  heaven- 
dwellers — the  angels  who  "willed  in  silence  their  own 
doom,"  the  gods  who  "forgot  themselves  to  men."  In- 
volved in  matter,  now  they  are  creating  a  new  empire 
for  the  spirit.  He  has  been  drawn  to  the  study  of  Celtic 
remains;  the  old  Irish  mythology  seems  to  him  a  frag- 
ment of  the  doctrine  that  was  held  by  the  Egyptians,  the 
Greeks,  and  the  Indians.  He  alludes  to  the  Irish  divini- 
ties as  if  they  were  as  well-known  as  Zeus  or  Eros  or 
Apollo.  He  is  the  mystical  poet  of  our  civilization,  and 
nearly  all  of  what  the  West  has  found  in  Rabindranath 
Tagore  is  in  the  poems  which  "AE"  has  been  writing  for 
the  past  twenty  years.  "AE"  takes  a  large  part  in  the 
public  life  of  Ireland,  and  his  prose,  which  is  splendidly 
eloquent,  pleads  for  and  shows  the  way  toward  the  crea- 
tion of  a  new  social  order.  He  is  also  one  of  Ireland's 
few  distinctive  painters. 

Doctor  Douglas  Hyde  has  written  in  Gaelic  and  in 
English,  his  Gaelic  work  being  in  the  form  of  lyrics  and 
one-act  plays.     But  it  is  by  his  collections  of 
Gaelic  folk-poetry  that  he  has  most  influenced  5!uSw  Hyde. 
Anglo-Irish   literature.     He   came   into   con- 
tact with  Gaelic  tradition,  not  through  books  and  trans- 
lations, but  through  the  speech  and  the  life  of  a  people. 
This  poet-scholar  lived  with  the  fishers  and  farmers  of 


466  A  HISTORY   OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  west  of  Ireland,  became  as  one  of  .them,  and  made 
a  great  collection  of  their  songs — love-songs,  drinking- 
songs,  political  songs.  His  collection  of  the  west  of 
Ireland  love-songs,  "Abhrain  Gradh  Chuige  Connacht, 
or  The  Love  Songs  of  Connacht,"  has  influenced  Irish 
poetry,  Irish  drama,  and  Irish  narrative.  Before  their 
publication,  if  one  were  asked  what  Irish  popular  songs 
were  in  existence  one  would  think  of  a  few  homely  bal- 
lads in  English.  But  Doctor  Hyde's  collections  showed 
that  Gaelic  Ireland  possessed  a  folk-poetry  that  was  as 
beautiful  and  as  subtle  as  any  in  Europe.  Besides  col- 
lecting the  songs,  Doctor  Hyde  made  admirable  transla- 
tions. In  some  of  them  he  reproduced  the  distinctive 
metrical  effects  of  Gaelic  verse,  thus  showing  how  some 
interesting  forms  might  be  adopted  into  English  poetry. 
In  translating  others  he  was  to  make  a  great  innovation 
in  Anglo-Irish  literature.  His  literal  prose  renderings 
were  in  the  idiom  and  the  rhythm  of  an  Irish  peasant's 
English.  These  little  prose  pieces  were  to  form  a  narra- 
tive and  a  dramatic  style.  Lady  Gregory  used  the  idiom 
in  her  version  of  Cuchullain  of  Muirlhemne  and  Gods  and 
Fighting  Men,  and  Mr.  Yeats  advised  Synge,  whom  he 
had  met  in  Paris,  to  make  use  of  it  in  the  Irish  plays 
which  he  was  about  to  write. 

In  the  nineties  the  ascendancy  of  the  national  drama 
of  Norway  made  a  few  Irish  writers — Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats, 
J.  M.  Synge.  Ml>  Geor8e  Moore,  Mr.  Edward  Martyn— 
think  of  creating  a  national  theatre  for  Ire- 
land. They  began  by  producing  in  Dublin  for  three  suc- 
cessive seasons  plays  written  by  Irish  writers  but  pre- 
sented by  English  actors.  This  experiment  closed  un- 
successfully in  1901.  Meanwhile  the  activities  of  the 
Gaelic  League  and  other  national  societies  had  produced 
a  company  of  Irish  players.  This  company  was  now 
ready  to  further  any  experiments  that  Mr.  Yeats,  now 
the  leader  of  the  Irish  dramatic  movement,  might  make. 


CONTEMPORARY    LITERATURE  467 

A  year  afterward  Mr.  Yeats  brought  into  the  company 
the  writer  who  was  to  prove  the  remarkable  dramatist 
of  the  movement — John  M.  Synge  (1871-1909). 

J.  M.  Synge  wrote  six  plays  for  the  Irish  Theatre,  five 
of  which  they  produced — The  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  Riders 
to  the  Sea,  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  The  Playboy  of 
the  Western  World,  and  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows, 
the  latter  a  powerful  dramatization  of  the  Exile  of  the  Sons 
of  Usnech  (Longes  mac  n-Usnig),  which  forms  one  of  the 
Three  Sorrows  of  Story-Telling  and  has  persisted  in  Irish 
tradition  for  at  least  a  thousand  years.  Synge's  genius 
consisted  in  his  ability  to  give  his  characters  a  place  in  na- 
.ture,  and  constantly  to  draw  poetry  from  this  surround- 
ing nature — in  Riders  to  the  Sea,  there  is  the  tragical  poetry 
of  the  actual  sea;  in  The  Shadow  of  the  Glen  there  is  the 
poetry  of  desolate  bogs  and  open  spaces;  in  The  Well  of  the 
Saints  there  is  the  simple  poetry  of  springtime;  in  Deirdre 
of  the  Sorrows  there  is  the  poetry  of  wood  and  glen.  With 
this  lyrical  poetry  there  is  intense  dramatic  poetry  also— 
the  poetry  that  his  characters  themselves  attain  in  their 
expression  of  resignation,  exaltation,  or  disillusionment. 
His  plays  are  masterpieces  of  construction,  and  it  may 
certainly  be  said  for  Riders  to  the  Sea  that  it  is  one  of 
the  best  short  tragedies  that  exists.  His  Playboy  of  the 
Western  World  is  racial  comedy  in  the  sense  that  Don 
Quixote  is  racial  comedy — it  satirizes  the  Irish  delight  in 
romantic  personality.  Synge's  is  the  most  colored  and 
musical  dramatic  dialogue  that  any  dramatist  has  at- 
tained in  English  since  the  Elizabethans;  taking  the  ac- 
tual speech  of  the  Irish  peasantry,  he  has  moulded  it  into 
a  wonderful  dramatic  utterance. 


READING   GUIDE 

THE  following  is  intended  as  a  working  bibliography, 
to  serve  as  guide  to  a  first-hand  acquaintance  with  the 
authors  treated  in  this  book,  and  to  some  of  the  biograph- 
ical and  critical  literature  concerning  them.  Cheap  and 
accessible  editions  and  short  biographies  are  given  prefer- 
ence. Authors  are  mentioned  in  the  order  in  which  they 
occur  in  the  body  of  the  book,  and  the  chapter-divisions 
are  followed,  except  that  the  two  chapters  on  the  novel 
are  thrown  together. 

Of  the  critical  matter  here  indicated,  the  young  student 
Is  of  course  not  expected  to  make  much  use;  but  it  will 
enable  him  to  extend  his  knowledge  of  any  given  author 
or  period  when  desired,  and  will  serve,  it  is  hoped,  as  a 
guide  to  after-study. 

GENERAL  WORKS   COVERING  THE  WHOLE  PERIOD 

Green's  Short  History  of  the  English  People  may  be  used  with  profit 
throughout,  to  connect  literary  with  social  and  political  history.  TrailTs 
Social  England  is  valuable  for  reference,  with  the  same  end  in  view.  The 
Dictionary  of  National  Biography  may  be  consulted  for  biographical  treat- 
ment fuller  than  that  given  in  the  text  and  less  extended  than  that  furnished 
by  the  separate  biographies  mentioned  below.  The  Cambridge  History  of 
English  Literature  is  a  monumental  work,  covering  the  entire  subject.  J. 
J.  Jusserand's  Literary  History  of  the  English  People  (Putnam)  and  Court- 
hope's  History  of  English  Poetry  (Macmillan)  are  comprehensive  and 
valuable.  Ward's  English  Poets  and  Craik's  English  Prose  give  extracts 
covering  practically  the  whole  course  of  English  literature,  and  are  especially 
valuable  in  the  case  of  minor  authors.  Ryland's  Chronological  Outlines  of 
English  Literature  is  extremely  useful  for  reference. 

CHAPTER  I:  THE  ANGLO-SAXON  PERIOD 

General  Works. — The  Cambridge  History  of  English  Literature,  vol.  I. 
Stopford  Brooke's  History  of  Early  English  Literature  and  his  English 
Literature  from  the  Beginning  to  the  Norman  Conquest  (Macmillan), 
469 


47° 


READING   GUIDE 


W.  P.  Ker's  Epic  and  Romance  (Macmillan) ;  and  English  Literature, 
Medieval  (Holt). 

Translations.— Beowulf :  F.  B.  Gummere's  The  Oldest  English  Epic  (Macmil- 
lan); C.  G.  Child's  Beowulf,  etc.  (Hough ton  Mifflin)  Cynewulf  and 
Csedmon:  C.  W.  Kennedy's  The  Poems  of  Cynewulf,  The  Poems  of 
Csedmon  (Button).  Longfellow's  Poets  and  Poetry  of  Europe  contains 
illustrations  of  early  poetry.  Tennyson's  translation  of  The  Battle  of 
Brunanburh  is  in  his  works.  Judith,  with  texT  and  translations,  is 
edited  by  A  S.  Cook  (Heath).  Cook  and  Tinker's  Translations  from 
Old  English  Prose,  Translations  from  Old  English  Poetry  (Ginn),  con- 
tain many  extracts,  and  many  short  works  entire. 

CHAPTER  II:  THE  NORMAN-FRENCH  PERIOD 

General  Works.— W.  H.  Schofield's  History  of  English  Literature  from  the 
Norman  Conquest  to  Chaucer  (Macmillan).  Ker's  Epic  and  Romance, 
and  English  Literature,  Medieval.  For  the  language,  see  H.  Bradley's 
Making  of  English  (Macmillan);  Greenough  and  Kittredge's  Words  and 
their  Ways  in  English  Speech  (Macmillan);  G.  P.  Krapp's  Modern 
English  (Scribner). 

Texts  and  Translations. — Many  romances  are  summarized  in  G.  Ellis's 
Specimens  of  Early  English  Metrical  Romances;  see  also  Schofield; 
and  the  translations  in  Weston's  Romance,  Vision,  and  Satire  (Hough- 
ton  Mifflin).  For  other  forms,  see  Neilson  and  Webster's  The  Chief 
British  Poets  of  the  Fourteenth  and  Fifteenth  Centuries  (Houghton 
Mifflin),  and  Weston's  The  Chief  Middle  English  Poets  (Houghton 
Mifflin).  Many  texts  are  in  Manly's  English  Poetry  (Ginn). 

CHAPTER  III:  THE  AGE  OF  CHAUCER 

General  Works. — Kittredge's  Chaucer  and  his  Poetry  (Harvard  University 
Press) ;  Root's  The  Poetry  of  Chaucer  (Houghton  Mifflin).  Jusserand's 
English  Wayfaring  Life  in  the  i4th  Century,  and  Conan  Doyle's 
White  Company  furnish  vivid  pictures  of  society.  Froissart's  Chroni- 
cles (Macmillan). 

CHAUCER.  Texts. — Single  volume  editions  are  edited  by  Skeat,  Students' 
Chaucer  (Clarendon  Press),  and  by  Pollard,  Globe  Chaucer  (Macmil- 
lan). Selections  are  edited  by  Skeat,  by  Greenlaw  (Scott,  Foresman), 
Emerson  (Macmillan),  and  many  others.  A  translation  by  Tatlock 
and  Mackaye,  The  Modern  Reader's  Chaucer. 

GOWER,  PIERS  THE  PLOWMAN,  etc.  Texts. — Gower  is  edited  by  G.  C. 
Macaulay  (Kegan  Paul).  Wyclif,  Select  English  Works,  is  edited  by 
Arnold  (Clarendon  Press).  Piers  the  Plowman  is  edited  by  Skeat 
(Clarendon  Press).  The  King's  Quair  is  edited  by  Skeat  (Blackwood). 
The  Travels  of  Sir  John  Mandeville  in  modern  spelling  is  published 
by  Macmillan.  Le  Morte  Darthur  is  edited  by  Gollancz  (Temple 
Classics).  Malory's  Morte  Darthur  (Temple  Classics).  English  and 
Scottish  Popular  Ballads  are  edited  by  Sargent  and  Kittredge  (Hough- 
ton  Mifflin)  and  by  Gummere  (Ginn). 


READING   GUIDE  471 

CHAPTER  IV:  THE  RENAISSANCE 

General  Works.— F.  Seebohm,  The  Era  of  the  Protestant  Revolution  (Scrib- 
ner);  L.  Einstein,  The  Italian  Renaissance  in  England  (Macmillan);  J. 
A.  Symonds,  A  History  of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy  (Smith  Elder);  Wm. 
Hazlitt,  Lectures  on  the  Literature  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth;  G.  Saints- 
bury,  Elizabethan  Literature  (Macmillan);  W.  Pater,  The  Renaissance: 
Studies  in  Art  and  Poetry  (Macmillan);  J.  Burckhardt,  The  Civiliza- 
tion of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy,  translated  by  S.  G.  C.  Middlemore; 
Sidney  Lee,  The  French  Renaissance  in  England  (Oxford,  1910);  F. 
E.  Schelling,  English  Literature  in  the  Life  Time  of  Shakespeare  (Holt, 
1910);  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  The  Age  of  Shakespeare  (Harper, 
1008) ;  Thomas  Seccombe  and  J.  W.  Allen,  The  Age  of  Shakespeare, 
1579-1631  (Bell,  1903);  Wm.  Harrison,  Description  of  England,  ed. 
Lothrop  Withington  (Scott);  G.  S.  Harrison,  Platonism  in  English 
Poetry  (Macmillan);  S.  Lee,  Great  Englishmen  of  the  i6th  Century. 

SIR  THOMAS  MORE. — Utopia,  with  other  ideal  commonwealths  (Morley's 
Universal  Library).  Utopia  and  History  of  Edward  V,  with  Roper's 
Life  of  More,  in  Camelot  Series  and  Temple  Classics.  Utopia,  in  Pitt 
Press  Series.  For  lives  of  Colet,  Erasmus,  and  More,  see  The  Oxford 
Reformers,  by  F.  Seebohm  (Longmans). 

ROGER  ASCHAM. — Toxophilus  and  The  Schoolmaster,  in  Arber's  English 
Reprints  (Macmillan).  English  Works:  Toxophilus;  Report  of  the 
Affairs  and  State  of  Germany;  The  Schoolmaster;  ed.  by  W.  A.  Wright 
(Cambridge  English  Classics,  1904). 

HUGH  LATIMER. — "  Sermon  on  the  Ploughers,"  in  Arber's  English  Reprints. 

WYATT  AND  SURREY. — Poems,  in  Tottel's  Miscellany,  Arber's  English  Re- 
prints; Poems,  Aldine  edition;  The  Surrey  and  Wyatt  Anthology,  ed. 
E.  Arber  (Frowde).  Wyatt's  Poems  (University  of  London  Press, 
1914).  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  and  His  Poems,  by  W.  E.  Simonds  (Heath). 
Essay  on  Wyatt  and  Surrey,  in  J.  W.  Hale's  Folia  Litteraria. 

THOMAS  SACKVILLE. — Induction,  and  Complaint  of  Buckingham,  in  Mir- 
ror for  Magistrates,  Library  of  Old  Authors  (Scribner);  Gorboduc  in 
Specimens  of  Preshakespearean  Drama,  edited  by  J.  M.  Manly  (Ginn). 
Gorboduc,  in  Early  English  Classical  Tragedies,  ed.  by  J.  W.  Cunliffe. 
Gorboduc,  in  Minor  Elizabethan  Drama,  ed.  by  Thorndike  (Every- 
man's Library). 

JOHN  LYLY. — Euphues,  in  Arber's  English  Reprints.  Endymion,  edited, 
with  essay,  by  G.  P.  Baker  (Holt);  Campaspe,  in  Manly 's  Specimens 
of  Preshakespearean  Drama  (Ginn).  Complete  Works  of  John  Lyly, 
ed.  R.  W.  Bond  (Oxford,  Clarendon  Press,  1902).  Endymion,  in  Minor 
Elizabethan  Drama,  ed.  by  Thorndike  (Everyman's  Library);  Life  of 
John  Lyly,  by  J.  D.  Wilson  (Cambridge,  1905). 

SIR  PHILIP  SIDNEY.  Texts. — Arcadia  (reproduction  of  old  edition),  edited 
by  H.  O.  Sommers  (Kegan  Paul);  Arcadia,  in  Early  Novelists,  ed.  by 
E.  A.  Baker  (New  York,  E.  P.  Dutton,  1907);  Works,  ed.  by  Albert 
Feuillerat  (Cambridge  University  Press)  in  Cambridge  English  Classics; 
Defense  of  Poesy,  ed.  A.  S.  Cook  (Ginn),  also  in  Pitt  Press  Series  and 


472 


READING   GUIDE 

Arber's  English  Reprints;  Complete  Poems,  ed.  by  A.  B.  Grosart,  Lon< 
don,  1873;  Poems,  in  the  Muses'  Library  (Dutton),  Astrophel  and 
Stella,  ed.  A.  Pollard  (Stott);  Selections,  prose,  ed.  G.  MacDonald,  in 
the  Elizabethan  Library  (McClurg);  Selections,  poetry,  ed.  A.  B.  Gro- 
sart, in  the  Elizabethan  Library  (Stock). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Fulke  Greville,  Lord  Brooke,  in 
vol.  IV  of  A.  B.  Grosart's  edition  of  the  Works  of  Lord  Brooke  (Fuller's 
Worthies  Library);  Life,  by  J.  A.  Symonds  (English  Men  of  Letters); 
Life,  by  H.  R.  Fox  Bourne  (Heroes  of  the  Nations);  Some  Sonnets  of 
Sir  Philip  Sidney,  in  Charles  Lamb's  Essays  of  Elia;  Life,  by  Percy 
Addleshaw  (London,  1009);  Life,  by  M.  W.  Wallace  (Cambridge, 


STEPHEN  GOSSON.— The  School  of  Abuse,  in  Arber's  English  Reprints. 

ROBERT  GREENE. — Works,  ed.  A.  B.  Grosart  (Huth  Library);  Dramatic 
Works  and  Poems,  ed.  A.  Dyce  (Pickering);  Friar  Bacon  and  Friar 
Bungay,  ed.  A.  Ward  (Oxford,  1892);  Menaphon,  ed.  E.  Arber  (Lon- 
don, 1880);  Groatsworth  of  Wit,  in  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  Pam- 
phlets, ed.  G.  E.  Saintsbury;  Poems  of  Greene,  Marlowe,  and  Ben 
Jonson,  i  vol.,  ed.  G.  Bell  (Bell);  Plays  and  Poems,  ed.  by  J.  C.  Collins 
(Oxford,  1905);  Plays,  ed.  by  T.  H.  Dickinson,  in  the  Mermaid  Seriet 
(Scribner);  Friar  Bacon  and  Friar  Bungay,  and  James  the  Fourth,  in 
Minor  Elizabethan  Drama,  ed.  by  A.  H.  Thorndike  (Everyman's 
Library). 

THOMAS  NASHE. — Works,  ed.  A.  B.  Grosart  (Huth  Library);  The  Un 
fortunate  Traveller,  edited,  with  essay  on  life  and  writings  of  Nashe., 
by  E.  Gosse  (Chiswick  Press);  Other  Papers  by  Nashe  in  Salisbury's. 
Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  Pamphlets;  Works,  ed.  by  R.  B.  McKerrow 
(London,  1904). 

THOMAS  LODGE. — Works,  ed.  E.  Gosse,  for  the  Hunterian  Club  (Glasgow, 
1883);  Sonnets,  in  Elizabethan  Sonnet-Cycles  (McClurg);  Rosalynde. 
In  Standard  English  Classics  (Ginn  &  Co.,  1910). 

GEORGE  PEELE.— Works,  ed.  A.  H.  Bullen  (Nimmo) ;  Poems  and  Plays,  in 
Morley's  Universal  Library;  David  and  Bethsaba,  and  The  Old  Wives' 
Tale,  in  Minor  Elizabethan  Drama,  ed.  by  A.  H.  Thorndike  (Every- 
man's Library). 

RICHARD  HOOKER.  Texts.— Works,  ed.  J.  Keble  (Oxford  University  Press, 
1836);  The  Laws  of  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  Books  1-4,  in  Morley's  Uni- 
versal Library. 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  Isaak  Walton  (with  lives  of 
Donne,  Wotton,  and  Herbert)  in  Morley's  Universal  Library;  Essay, 
by  E.  Dowden,  in  Puritan  and  Anglican  (Holt). 

EDMUND  SPENSER.  Texts.— Works,  ed.  Grosart;  Works,  Globe  edition, 
with  memoir  by  J.  W.  Hales  (Macmillan);  Works,  Aldine  edition; 
Complete  Poetical  Works,  Cambridge  edition  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1008); 
Minor  Poems,  in  Temple  Classics  (Macmillan);  Minor  Poems,  ed.  by 
Ernest  de  S6lincourt  (Oxford,  1910);  Faerie  Queene  (in  Everyman's 
Library);  Faerie  Queene,  ed.  by  J.  C.  Smith  (Oxford,  1909);  Faerie 
Queene,  bk.  I,  ed.  by  M.  H.  Shackford,  Riverside  Literature  Series, 


READING   GUIDE  473 

No.  160  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1905);  Faerie  Queene,  bks.  I  and  II,  ed.  by 
G.  W.  Kitchin,  Clarendon  Press  Series  (Oxford.  1905);  Selections  from 
the  Faerie  Queene,  ed.  by  John  Erskine  (Longman's  English  Classics); 
Selected  Poems,  with  introduction  by  R.  Noel,  in  Canterbury  Poets 
Series;  Spenser  Anthology,  ed.  E.  Arber  (Frowde). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  R.  W.  Church  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  An  Outline  Guide  to  the  Study  of  Spenser,  by  F.  I.  Carpenter 
(University  of  Chicago,  1894);  Essay,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Among  my 
Books,  and  by  E.  Dowden,  in  Transcripts  and  Studies;  Chaucer  and 
Spenser,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English  Poets.  See  also  W. 
S.  Lander's  Imaginary  Conversations  Essex  and  Spenser  and  Elizabeth 
and  Cecil;  Fleay,  F.  G.,  Guide  to  Chaucer  and  Spenser  (1877). 

GABRIEL  HARVEY— Works,  ed.  A.  B.  Grosart  (Huth  Library). 

GEORGE  CHAPMAN.  Texts. — Poems,  Plays,  and  Translations,  ed.  R.  H. 
Shepherd,  with  study  of  Chapman  by  A.  C.  Swinburne  (London, 
1874);  Plays,  in  Mermaid  Series;  Translation  of  Iliad,  in  Morley's 
Universal  Library;  Plays  and  Poems,  ed.  T.  M.  Parrott  (New  York, 
1910);  All  Fooles,  and  The  Gentleman  Usher,  ed.  T.  M.  Parrott,  in 
Belles  Lettres  Series  (Boston,  1907);  Alphonsus,  Emperor  of  Germany, 
ed.  H.  F.  Schwarz  (New  York,  1913);  Bussy  D'Ambois,  ed.  F.  S.  Boas, 
in  Belles  Lettres  Series  (Boston,  1905). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Chapman,  a  Critical  Study,  by  A.  C 
Swinburne  (Chatto  and  Windus);  Essay,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  The  Old 
English  Dramatists,  and  in  Conversations  on  Some  of  the  Old  Poets. 

MICHAEL  DRAYTON. — Idea's  Mirror,  in  Arber's  English  Garner,  Elizabethan 
Sonnet-Cycles;  Daniel's  Delia  and  Drayton's  Idea,  in  King's  Classics, 
ed.  A.  Esdaile  (London,  1908);  Critical  Study  by  Oliver  Elton  (London, 

1905)- 

SAMUEL  DANIEL.— Sonnets,  in  Elizabethan  Sonnet-Cycles;  Defense  of 
Rhyme,  in  Ancient  Critical  Essays,  ed.  Haslewood;  in  Elizabethan 
Essays,  ed.  G.  Smith.  Daniel's  Delia  and  Drayton's  Idea,  in  King's 
Classics,  ed.  A.  Esdaile  (London,  1908). 

CHRISTOPHER  MARLOWE. — Poems  of  Greene,  Marlowe,  and  Ben  Jonson, 
ed.  R.  Bell  (Bell).  For  Marlowe's  plays,  and  critical  works  upon 
him,  see  next  division. 

THOMAS  CAMPION. — Book  of  Airs,  in  Arber's  English  Garner;  Poems  (Dent); 
Works,  ed.  Perceval  Vivian  (Oxford,  1909);  Songs  and  Masques,  ed. 
A.  H.  Bullen  (London,  1903). 

Other  collections  of  Elizabethan  Lyrics  are:  Lyrics  from  the  Drama- 
tists of  the  Elizabethan  Age,  ed.  A.  H.  Bullen  (Lawrence  and  Bullen); 
Poems,  chiefly  lyrical,  from  Elizabethan  Romances,  etc.,  ed.  A.  H. 
Bullen  (Nimmo);  English  Madrigals  in  the  Time  of  Shakespeare,  ed. 
F.  A.  Cox  (Dent);  A  Book  of  Elizabethan  Lyrics,  ed.  F.  E.  Schelling 
(Athenseum  Press  Series);  Elizabethan  Songs,  ed.  E.  H.  Garrett,  with 
introduction  by  A.  Lang  (Osgood,  Mcllvaine);  An  English  Garner 
(London,  1903);  English  Lyric  Poetry,  1500-1700,  ed.  F.  I.  Carpenter 
(London,  1897);  Early  Sixteenth  Century  Lyrics,  ed.  F.  M.  Padelford, 
in  Belles  Lettres  Series  (Boston,  1907). 


474 


READING   GUIDE 


SIR  WALTER  RALEIGH.  Texts. — Works  (Oxford  University  Press);  Selec- 
tions, ed.  A.  B.  Grosart,  in  the  Elizabethan  Library  (Stock);  Poems 
in  Courtly  Poets,  ed.  Hannah,  Aldine  edition;  The  Fight  of  the  Re- 
venge, in  Arber's  English  Reprints. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  E.  Gosse  (English  Worthies); 
Life,  by  E.  Edwards  (Macmillan);  Essay,  by  Charles  Kingsley,  in  Plays 
and  Puritans  and  Other  Essays  (Macmillan,  1889);  Life,  by  W.  Steb- 
bing  (Clarendon  Press). 

CHAPTER  V:  THE  DRAMA  BEFORE  SHAKESPEARE 

Texts.— The  principal  texts  necessary  for  a  study  of  this  period  of  the 
drama,  up  to  Marlowe,  will  be  found  in  Specimens  of  Preshakespearean 
Drama,  2  vols.,  ed.  J.  M.  Manly  (Ginn);  English  Miracle  Plays,  Morali- 
ties, and  Interludes,  by  A.  W.  Pollard,  contains  some  pieces  not  given 
in  Manly's  Specimens,  and  an  interesting  essay  on  the  origin  of  the 
drama;  Even-man,  etc.,  in  Everyman's  Library.  For  plays  of  Lyly, 
Greene,  and  Peele,  see  preceding  section.  Marlowe's  complete  works 
are  edited  by  A.  H.  Bullen  (Nimmo) ;  his  chief  plays  are  in  the  Mermaid 
Series  (Scribner),  ed.  H.  Ellis;  Dr.  Faustus  is  edited  by  W.  Wagner 
(Longmans),  and  by  A.  W.  Ward;  Edward  the  Second  is  edited  by  A. 
W.  Verity  (Dent);  Marlowe's  Works,  ed.  C.  F.  Tucker  Brooke  (Oxford, 
1910);  Marlowe's  Plays,  in  Everyman's  Library.  Minor  Elizabethan 
Drama,  ed.  A.  H.  Thorndike,  2  vols.  in  Everyman's  Library;  Chief 
Elizabethan  Dramatists,  ed.  W.  A.  Neilson  (Boston,  Houghton  Mifflin, 
1911);  Representative  English  Comedy,  ed.  C.  M.  Gayley  (New  York, 
1903)- 

History  and  Criticism. — A  History  of  English  Dramatic  Literature  to  the 
Death  of  Queen  Anne,  by  A.  W.  Ward,  new  edition,  1899;  Shakespeare's 
Predecessors,  by  J.  A.  Symonds;  Shakespeare  and  His  Predecessors,  by 
F.  S.  Boas  (Scribner);  The  Influence  of  Seneca  on  Elizabethan  Tragedy, 
by  J.  W.  Cunliffe  (Macmillan);  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  Dramatic 
Literature  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth  gives  a  good  general  view  of  the 
causes  leading  up  to  the  outburst  of  poetry  in  the  later  years  of  Eliza- 
beth's reign  Predecessors  of  Shakespeare,  in  the  Essays  and  Studies  of 
J.  C.  Collins;  The  Tudor  Drama,  by  C.  F.  T.  Brooke  (Boston,  Houghton 
Mifflin,  1911);  The  Medieval  Stage,  by  E.  K.  Chambers  (Oxford,  1903); 
The  Miracle  Play  in  England,  by  S.  W.  Clarke  (London,  1894);  Plays  of 
our  Forefathers,  by  C.  M.  Gayley  (New  York,  Dumetd,  1907);  English 
Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities,  by  E.  H.  Moore  (London,  1907);  The 
English  Chronicle  Play,  by  Felix  E.  Schelling  (New  York,  Macmillan, 
1902);  English  Drama,  by  Felix  E  Schelling  (New  York,  Dent,  1914); 
Growth  of  the  English  Drama,  by  Arnold  Wynne  (Oxford,  1914). 
For  Marlowe,  see  essays  by  E  Dowden,  in  Transcripts  and  Studies, 
and  by  H  Kingsley,  in  Fireside  Studies,  and  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  The 
Old  English  Dramatists.  For  the  history  of  the  stage,  see  A  Chronicle 
History  of  the  London  Stage,  1559-1642,  by  F.  G.  Fleay. 


READING   GUIDE  475 


CHAPTER  VI:  SHAKESPEARE  * 

Bioivaphy  and  Criticism.  Extended  Works. — Life  of  William  Shakespeare, 
by  S.  Lee  (Macmillan) ;  Shakespeare,  a  critical  study  of  his  mind  and 
art,  by  E.  Dowden  (Harper) ;  William  Shakespeare,  a  critical  study,  by 
G.  Brarxdes  (Macmillan);  Shakespeare,  his  life,  art,  and  characters,  with 
an  historical  sketch  of  the  origin  and  growth  of  the  drama  in  England, 
by  H-  N.  Hudson  (Ginn);  Shakespeare  as  a  Dramatic  Artist,  by  R.  G. 
Moulton  (Clarendon  Press) ;  A  Chronicle  History  of  the  Life  and  Work 
of  Shakespeare,  by  F.  G.  Fleay  (Nimmo);  William  Shakspere,  a  study 
in  Elizabethan  Literature,  by  B.  Wendell  (Scribner);  William  Shake- 
speare, Poet,  Dramatist,  and  Man,  by  H.  W.  Mabie  (Macmillan); 
Shakespeare  the  Man,  by  Goldwin  Smith  (Doubleday,  Page) ;  The  De- 
velopment of  Shakespeare  as  a  Dramatist,  by  G.  P.  Baker  (New  York, 
1907);  William  Shakespeare,  his  Family  and  Friends,  by  C.  I.  Elton 
(New  York,  Dutton,  1904);  Life,  by  F.  J.  Furnivall  (New  York,  Cassel, 
1908);  The  Man  Shakespeare,  by  Frank  Harris  (New  York,  Kennerley, 
1911);  Shakespeare  as  a  Dramatic  Artist,  by  T.  R.  Lounsbury  (New 
York,  Scribner,  1901);  Life,  by  John  Masefield,  in  Home  University 
Library  (London,  1911);  Shakespeare  as  a  Playwright,  by  Brander 
Matthews  (New  York,  Scribner,  1913);  Shakespeare  as  a  Dramatic 
Thinker,  by  R.  G.  Moulton  (Macmillan,  1901);  The  Facts  about 
Shakespeare,  by  W.  A.  Neilson  and  A.  H.  Thorndike  (Macmillan,  1915); 
Life,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (Macmillan,  1907);  Life,  by  W.  J.  Rolfe 
(Boston,  1905). 

Essays  and  Studies. — Introduction  to  Shakespeare,  by  E.  Dowden  (Blackie); 
Shakespeare  Primer,  by  E.  Dowden;  Shakespearean  Primer,  by  I.  Gol- 
lancz  (Macmillan);  Seven  Lectures  on  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  by  S. 
T.  Coleridge;  Five  Lectures  on  Shakespeare,  by  B.  Ten  Brink  (Holt); 
Studies  in  Shakespeare,  by  R.  G.  White  (Houghton  Mifflin);  Notes  and 
Essays  on  Shakespeare,  J.  \V.  Hales;  Characters  of  Shakespeare's 
Plays,  by  W.  Hazlitt  (Bohn's  Standard  Library);  Shakespeare's  Female 
Characters,  also  entitled  Characteristics  of  Women,  by  Mrs.  Jameson; 
Shakespeare  and  Ben  Jonson,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English 
Comic  Writers;  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on 
the  English  Poets;  On  Shakespeare's  tragedies,  and  their  fitness  for 
stage  presentation,  in  Charles  Lamb's  Essays  of  Elia;  Shakespeare,  or 
the  Poet,  in  R.  W.  Emerson's  Representative  Men;  Shakespeare  Once 
More,  in  J.  R.  Lowell's  Among  my  Books;  Shakespeare's  Kings,  in  R. 
L.  Stevenson's  Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books;  Shakespeare  the 
Man,  hi  W.  Bagehot's  Literary  Studies;  A  Study  of  Shakespeare,  A. 
C.  Swinburne;  Shakesperean  Tragedy,  by  A.  C.  Bradley  (1904);  The 
Women  of  Shakespeare,  by  Frank  Harris  (London,  1911);  Shakespeare 
and  his  Forerunners,  by  Sidney  Lanier  (New  York,  Doubleday,  Page, 
1908);  Shakespeare  and  the  Modern  Stage,  by  Sidney  Lee  (New  York, 

>  As  available  and  sufficiently  trustworthy  editions  of  Shakespeare  are  very  numer- 
ous, no  texts  are  given. 


470  READING   GUIDE 

Scribner,  1906);  A  Handbook  to  the  Works  of  Shakespeare,  by  M. 
Luce  (1907);  Shakespeare's  Theatre,  by  A.  H.  Thorndike  (New  York, 
Macmillan,  1916).- 

Miscellaneous. — Shakespeare's  Versification,  by  G.  H.  Browne  (Ginn); 
Shakespeare's  London,  by  J.  F.  Ordish  (Dent);  Shakespeare's  England, 
by  G.  W.  Thornbury  (Longmans) ;  A  Chronicle  History  of  the  London 
Stage,  1559-1642,  by  F.  G.  Fleay;  Shakespeare's  Holinshed,  a  com- 
parison of  the  chronicle  and  the  history  plays,  by  W.  G.  B.  Stone  (Long- 
mans); The  English  Chronicle  Play,  by  F.  E.  Schelling  (Macmillan); 
The  Girlhood  of  Shakespeare's  Heroines,  by  Mary  Cowden  Clark 
(Armstrong,  1887);  Tales  from  Shakespeare,  by  Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb  (Riverside  Library);  Citation  and  Examination  of  William  Shake- 
speare, by  W.  S.  Landor;  The  Italy  of  the  Elizabethan  Dramatists,  in 
Violet  Paget's  Euphorion;  Shakespeare's  London,  by  H.  T.  Stephenson 
(1910). 

For  language,  see  Abbott's  Shakespearean  Grammar,  and  Schmidt's 
Shakespeare  Lexicon  (Leipsic). 

CHAPTER  VII:  SHAKESPEARE'S  CONTEMPORARIES  AND  SUCCESSORS  IN 
THE  DRAMA 

Texts.— All  the  texts  necessary  for  the  study  of  this  period  are  included  in 
the  Mermaid  Series  of  works  of  the  old  dramatists  (Scribner).  Jon- 
son's  Works,  ed.  H.  C.  Hart  (London,  1906);  Jonson's  Complete  Plays, 
2  vols.,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Ben  Jonson's  Alchemist,  Volpone, 
Silent  Woman,  Sad  Shepherd,  and  Poems,  are  given  in  Morley's  Uni- 
versal Library.  Several  of  Jonson's  Masques,  with  others,  and  an 
essay  on  the  Masque,  in  H.  A.  Evans's  English  Masques;  Jonson's 
Timber,  ed.  F.  E.  Schelling  (Ginn);  Beaumont  and  Fletcher.'s  Plays, 
ed.  F.  E.  Schelling,  in  Masterpieces  of  the  English  Drama  (New  York, 
1912);  Plays  by  Webster  and  Tourneur  in  Masterpieces  of  the  English 
Drama  (New  York,  1912). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — A  Biographical  Chronicle  of  the  English 
Drama,  1559-1642,  by  F.  G.  Fleay  (Reeves  and  Turner);  Shake- 
speare and  Ben  Jonson,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English  Comic 
Writers;  Life  of  Ben  Jonson,  by  J.  A.  Symonds;  A  Study  of  Ben  Jon- 
son,  by  A.  C.  Swinburne;  John  Webster,  in  E.  Gosse's  Seventeenth 
Century  Studies,  and  in  A.  C.  Swinburne's  Studies  in  Prose  and  Poetry; 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  in  Swinburne's  Studies  in  Prose  and  Poetry; 
John  Ford,  in  Lowell's  Conversations  on  Some  of  the  Old  Poets,  and  in 
Swinburne's  Essays  and  Studies;  Massinger,  in  A.  Symons's  Studies  in 
Two  Literatures.  E.  Gosse's  Jacobean  Poets  treats  Jonson,  Chap- 
man, Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  Heywood,  Middleton,  Webster,  and 
Massinger.  J.  R.  Lowell's  Old  English  Dramatists  treats  (besides 
Marlowe)  Webster,  Chapman,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  Massinger, 
and  Ford;  English  Drama  in  the  Age  of  Shakespeare,  by  Creizenach 
(Lippincott,  1916);  Beaumont  the  Dramatist,  by  C.  M.  Gayley  (Cen- 
tury, 1904);  The  Elizabethan  Drama,  1558-1642,  by  F.  E.  Schelling 
(Hough ton  Mifflin,  1908). 


READING   GUIDE  477 

CHAPTER  VIII:  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  NON-DRAMATIC  LITERATURE 

BEFORE   THE   RESTORATION 

General  Works. — S.  R.  Gardiner's  History  of  England,  1603-1660.  G.  E. 
Saintsbury's  Elizabethan  Literature.  English  Lyric  Poetry,  1500- 
1700,  Selections,  with  essay,  by  F.  I.  Carpenter  (Scribner);  Puritan  and 
Anglican,  by  Edward  Dowden  (Holt,  1901);  Seventeenth  Century 
Studies,  by  E.  W.  Gosse  (Dodd,  Mead,  1885);  The  Age  of  Milton,  by 
J.  H.  B.  Masterman  (London,  191 1);  The  Temper  of  the  Seventeenth 
Century,  by  Barrett  Wendell  (Scribner,  1903) ;  Minor  Poets  of  the  Caro- 
line Period,  ed.  by  George  Saintsbury  (Oxford,  1905) ;  A  Book  of  Seven- 
teenth Century  Lyrics,  ed.  by  F.  E.  Schelling  (Ginn,  1899). 

FRANCIS  BACON.  Texts. — Works,  ed.  Ellis,  Spedding,  and  Heath.  Essays 
in  Morley's  Universal  Library;  Essays,  ed.  M.  A.  Scott  (Scribner,  1008); 
Essays  in  Everyman's  Library;  Advancement  of  Learning,  ed.  Wright 
(Clarendon  Press  Series) ;  both  Essays  and  Advancement  of  Learning 
in  Macmillan's  Library  of  English  Classics;  Selections,  ed.  A.  B.  Gro- 
sart,  in  The  Elizabethan  Library  (Stock);  New  Atlantis,  ed.  A.  B. 
Gough  (Oxford,  1915). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life  and  Times  of,  by  J.  Spedding 
(1878);  Life,  by  R.  W.  Church  (English  Men  of  Letters);  Life  and 
Philosophy,  by  J.  Nichols;  Essay  by  T.  B.  Macaulay;  Bacon,  compared 
as  to  style  with  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  Jeremy  Taylor,  in  W.  Hazlitt's 
Lectures  on  the  Literature  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth. 

JOHN  DONNE.  Texts. — Poems,  in  Muses'  Library,  ed.  E.  K.  Chambers, 
with  introduction  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury;  Poems,  ed.  H.  J.  C.  Grierson 
(Oxford,  1912);  Poems,  ed.  C.  E.  Norton. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life  and  Letters,  by  E.  Gosse  (Dodd, 
Mead);  John  Donne,  sometime  Dean  of  St.  Paul's,  by  A.  Jessopp 
(Houghton  Mifflin);  Life,  in  Walton's  Lives,  Morley's  Universal  Li- 
brary. Essay  in  E.  Dowden's  New  Studies,  and  in  E.  Gosse's  Jacobean 
Poets. 

JEREMY  TAYLOR. — Holy  Living  and  Dying,  in  Bohn's  Standard  Library. 
Selections,  ed.  E.  E.  Wentworth  (Ginn).  Life  of  Jeremy  Taylor,  with 
a  critical  examination  of  his  writings,  by  R.  Heber;  Essay  by  E.  Dowden, 
in  Puritan  and  Anglican;  Life,  by  Edmund  Gosse  in  English  Men 
of  Letters.  See  also  W.  Hazlitt's  Literature  of  the  Age  of  Eliza- 
beth. 

SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE.  Texts. — Works,  3  vols.,  in  Bohn's  Library;  Works, 
ed.  by  Charles  Sayle  (London,  1904);  Hydriotaphia  (Urn-Burial)  and 
Garden  of  Cyrus,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series;  Religio  Medici  and  Urn- 
Burial,  with  introduction  by  J.  A.  Symonds,  in  Camelot  Series;  Religio 
Medici  and  other  Essays,  ed.  D.  L.  Roberts  (Stott  Library);  Religio 
Medici,  Letter  to  a  Friend,  and  Christian  Morals,  ed.  by  W.  A.  Green- 
hill,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series  (Macmillan,  1901);  Religio  Medici,  in 
Everyman's  Library. 

Criticism. — Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library;  by  E. 
Dowden,  in  Puritan  and  Anglican;  by  W.  Pater,  in  Appreciations. 


47* 


READING   GUIDE 


See  also  W.  Hazlitt's  Literature  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth;  Life,  by  Ed- 
mund Gosse,  in  English  Men  of  Letters. 

THE  CAVALIER  POETS. — Works  of  Sir  John  Suckling,  ed.  by  A.  H.  Thompson 
(Button,  1910);  Poems  of  Sir  Thomas  Carew,  ed.  by  Arthur  Vincent 
(Muses'  Library,  1899).  For  selections,  see  Cavalier  and  Courtier  Lyr- 
ists, an  anthology  of  minor  seventeenth  century  verse,  in  Canterbury 
Poets  Series  (Scott);  English  Lyric  Poetry,  1500-1700,  Selections,  with 
essay,  by  F.  I.  Carpenter  (Scribner);  A  Book  of  Seventeenth  Century 
Lyrics,  ed.  by  F.  E.  Schelling  (Ginn,  1899);  The  Cavalier  Poets,  by 
Carl  Holliday  (New  York,  1911). 

WILLIAM  BROWNE. — Poetical  Works,  with  introduction  by  A.  H.  Bullen, 
in  the  Muses'  Library.  See  Gosse's  Jacobean  Poets. 

GEORGE  WITHER. — Poems,  ed.  by  Frank  Sidgwick,  in  the  Muses'  library 
(Button,  1002);  Poems,  with  introduction  by  H.  Morley,  in  Compan- 
ion Poet  Series  (Routledge).  See  also  Gosse's  Jacobean  Poets. 

ISAAK  WALTON. — Complete  Angler,  with  introduction  by  A.  Lang  (Bent); 
Complete  Angler,  in  Everyman's  Library;  \Valton's  Lives  (of  Bonne, 
Herbert,  etc.),  in  Morley's  Universal  Library.  Essay  by  J.  R.  Lowell, 
in  Latest  Literary  Essay's. 

ROBERT  HERRICK. — Hesperides  and  Noble  Numbers,  ed.  A.  Pollard,  with 
introduction  by  A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Muses'  Library;  Poetical  Works, 
ed.  by  F.  W.  Moorman  (Oxford,  1915);  Hesperides  and  Noble  Num- 
bers, in  Everyman's  Library;  Hesperides,  ed.  E.  Rhys,  in  Canterbury 
Poets;  Selections,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series,  and  Athenaeum  Press 
Series.  Essays,  by  E.  Gosse,  in  Seventeenth  Century  Studies,  and 
A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Studies  in  Prose  and  Poetry;  Life,  by  F.  W.  Moor- 
man (Lane,  1910). 

GILES  FLETCHER. — Complete  Poems,  ed.  A.  B.  Grosart,  Fuller's  Worthies 
Library;  Poetical  Works  of  Giles  and  Phineas  Fletcher,  ed.  by  F.  S. 
Boas,  2  vols.  (Cambridge  English  Classics,  1908).  See  Gosse's  Jacobean 
Poets. 

GEORGE  HERBERT. — Works,  hi  3  vols.,  ed.  by  G.  H.  Palmer  (Hough ton 
Mifflin,  1905);  Poetical  Works  of  Herbert  and  Vaughan,  in  British 
Poets,  Riverside  Edition  (Houghton  Mifflin);  The  Temple,  in  Mor- 
ley's Universal  Library,  and  in  the  Temple  Classics;  Poems,  with  selec- 
tions from  his  prose,  and  Walton's  Life  of  Herbert,  ed.  Rhys,  in  Canter- 
bury- Poets  Series.  Essay,  by  E.  Bowden,  in  Puritan  and  Anglican; 
Life,  by  J.  J.j  Baniell;  George  Herbert  and  His  Tunes,  by  A.  G. 
Hyde. 

HENRY  VAUGHAN.— Poetical  Works,  ed.  E.  K.  Chambers,  in  Muses'  Library; 
Sacred  Poems,  ed.  H.  F.  Lyte,  in  Aldine  edition;  Works,  in  2  vols. 
(Oxford,  1914).  Essays  by  E.  Bowden,  in  Puritan  and  Anglican. 
RICHARD  CRASHAW.— Works,  ed.  A.  B.  Grosart,  Fuller's  Worthies  Library'; 
Poems,  in  the  Muses'  Library;  Poems,  Cambridge  English  Classics 
(Cambridge,  1904).  Essay,  by  E.  Gosse,  in  Seventeenth  Century 
Studies. 

ANDREW  MARVELL.— Poems,  ed.  G.  A.  Aitken,  Muses'  Library;  Life,  by 
Augustine  Birrell,  in  English  Men  of  Letters  Series.  Essays  by  H. 


READING   GUIDE  479 

Rogers,  in  Essays  Biographical  and  Critical;  by  A.  C.  Benson,  in  his 
Essays. 

ABRAHAM  COWLEY. — Complete  works,  with  introduction  by  A.  B.  Gro- 
sart,  Chertsey  Worthies  Library;  Poems,  in  Cambridge  English  Classics 
(Cambridge,  University  Press,  1905);  Essays  (Oxford,  Clarendon  Press, 
1915);  Cowley's  Essays,  ed.  Hurd  (London,  1868).  Essay  in  Gosse's 
Seventeenth  Century  Studies,  and  in  W.  Stebbing's  Some  Verdicts  of 
History  Reversed. 

JOHN  MILTON.  Texts. — Poetical  Works,  ed.  Masson,  Globe  edition;  Poeti- 
cal Works,  with  a  translation  of  the  Latin  poems,  ed.  Moody,  Cam- 
bridge edition  (Houghton  Mifflin);  Poetical  Works,  in  Everyman's 
Library;  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  W.  Raleigh  (1905);  Minor  Poems, 
ed.  by  H.  C.  Beeching  (1903);  Paradise  Lost,  Books  I  and  II,  in  the 
Macmillan  Pocket  Edition  of  the  English  Classics  (1902);  Prose  Writ- 
ings, ed.  Morley,  Carisbrooke  Library;  Prose  Writings,  Bonn's  Stand- 
ard Library ;  Education,  Areopagitica,  The  Commonwealth,  in  Riverside 
Literature  Series  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1911);  Areopagitica,  ed.  J.  W. 
Hales  (Clarendon  Press). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  M.  Pattison  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  W.  Raleigh  (Putnam);  Life,  by  R.  Garnett  (Great 
Writers  Series);  Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson,  in  Lives  of  the  Poets;  the  most 
available  edition  is  Six  Chief  Lives  from  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets, 
ed.  M.  Arnold  (Macmillan);  Life  and  Times,  6  vols.,  by  D.  Masson. 
Essays,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Among  My  Books  and  in  Latest  Literary 
Essays;  by  M.  Arnold,  in  Essays  in  Criticism;  by  E.  Dowden,  in  Puri- 
tan and  Anglican  and  in  Transcripts  and  Studies;  by  W.  Bagehot,  in 
Literary  Studies.  Addison's  Criticism  on  Paradise  Lost,  ed.  A.  S. 
Cook  (Ginn);  Studies  in  Milton,  Alden  Sampson  (Moffat  Yard,  1913); 
Milton's  Astronomy,  T.  N.  Orchard  (Longmans,  1913);  Milton's 
Prosody,  Robert  S.  Bridges  (Oxford,  1901). 

JOHN  BUNYAN.  Texts. — Grace  Abounding,  in  Cassell's  National  Library; 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series  and  Riverside  Literature 
Series  and  in  Everyman's  Library;  Life  and  Death  of  Mr.  Badman, 
and  The  Holy  War,  in  the  Cambridge  English  Classics  (Cambridge, 
University  Press,  1905). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  A.  Froude  (English  Men  of 
Letters).  Essays,  by  T.  B.  Macaulay;  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  Makers 
of  Literature;  by  E.  Dowden,  in  Puritan  and  Anglican;  by  J.  Tulloch, 
in  English  Puritanism  and  its  Leaders. 

CHAPTER  LX:  THE  RESTORATION 

General  Works. — Macaulay's  History  of  England;  The  Age  of  Dryden,  by 
R.  Garnett  (Bell);  Le  Publique  et  les  Hommes  de  Lettres  en  Angle- 
terre,  1660-1744,  Beljame;  From  Shakespeare  to  Pope,  by  E.  Gosse, 
treats  of  the  rise  of  the  classical  school.  Eighteenth  Century  Litera- 
ture, E.  Gosse  (Macmillan). 

JOHN  DRYDEN.  Texts. — Poetical  Works,  ed.  W.  D.  Christie,  Globe  edition; 
Poetical  Works,  Cambridge  Edition  (Houghton  Mifflin);  Poems,  ed. 


480  READING   GUIDE 

by  John  Sargeaunt  (1910);  Select  Poems,  ed.  W.  D.  Christie  (Clarendon 
Press);  The  Dryden  Anthology,  ed.  E.  Arber  (Frowde);  Essays, 
selected  and  edited  by  W.  P.  Ker  (Clarendon  Press);  Translation  of 
.Eneid,  in  Morley's  Universal  Library;  Plays,  ed.  by  George  Saints- 
bury,  in  Mermaid  Series;  Selected  Dramas,  ed.  by  G.  R.  Noyes  (Scott, 
Foresman,  1915);  Selected  Essays,  ed.  by  C.  D.  Yonge  (1888);  Essay 
on  Dramatic  Poesy,  ed.  by  Thomas  Arnold  (Oxford,  1903). 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury  (English  Men 
of  Letters);  Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson  (for  edition  see  under  Milton).  Es- 
says, by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Among  My  Books;  by  J.  C.  Collins,  in  Essays 
and  Studies;  by  D.  Masson,  in  The  Three  Devils  and  Other  Essays; 
by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  Lectures  on  the  English  Poets. 

SAMUEL  BUTLER.— Poetical  Works,  in  British  Poets,  .Riverside  Edition 
(Houghton  Mifflin);  Hudibras,  in  Morley's  Universal  Library;  Hudi- 
bras,  ed.  by  A.  R.  Waller,  in  Cambridge  English  Classics.  Characters 
and  Passages  from  the  Note  Books,  ed.  by  A.  R.  Waller,  in  Cambridge 
English  Classics  (1908).  Essay,  by  E.  Dowden,  in  Puritan  and  Angli- 
can. 

SAMUEL  PEPYS. — Diary,  with  selections  from  his  correspondence,  ed.  Lord 
Braybrooke,  in  Chandos  Library  (Warne);  Diary,  2  vols.,  in  Every- 
man's Library;  Diary,  ed.  Mynors  Bright  (Bickers).  Samuel  Pepys 
and  the  World  he  Lived  in,  by  H.  B.  Wheatley  (Scribner);  Essay,  by 
R.  L.  Stevenson,  in  Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books  (Scribner). 
THOMAS  OTWAY.— Plays,  ed.  R.  Noel  (Mermaid  Series);  The  Orphan,  and 

Venice  Preserved,  in  Belles  Lettres  Series  (Heath). 

WILLIAM  WYCHERLEY.— Plays,  ed.  W.  C.  Ward  (Mermaid  Series).  See 
Wycherley,  Congreve,  etc.,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English 
Comic  Writers. 

WILLIAM  CONGREVE. — Plays,  ed.  A.  C.  Ewald  (Mermaid  Series).  Life, 
by  E.  Gosse  (Great  Writers);  Congreve,  in  W,  M.  Thackeray's  English 
Humorists.  See  also  under  Wycherley.  For  Wycherley,  Congreve, 
and  the  Restoration  comedy,  see  C.  Lamb's  essay  On  the  Artificial 
Comedy  of  the  Last  Century,  and  G.  Meredith's  Essay  on  Comedy 
and  the  Comic  Spirit  (Scribner);  Plays  of  the  above  dramatists  are  to 
be  found  in  Representative  English  Dramas  from  Dryden  to  Sheridan, 
ed.  by  Frederick  Tupper  and  James  W.  Tupper  (Oxford,  1914). 

CHAPTER  X:  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY:  THE  REIGN  OF 

CLASSICISM 

General  Works.— History  of  England  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  W.  E. 
H.  Lecky;  English  Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  L.  Stephen; 
History  of  English  Literature  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  T.  S. 
Perry;  Eighteenth  Century  Literature,  by  E.  Gosse;  The  Age  of  Pope, 
by  J.  Dennis;  The  Age  of  Johnson,  by  T.  Seccombe  (Macmillan) ;  Le 
Publique  et  les  Hommes  de  Lettres  en  Angleterre,  1660-1744.  For 
the  early  history  of  Journalism,  see  H.  R.  Fox  Bourne's  English  News- 
papers, chaps.  1-5  (Chatto  and  Windus,  1887).  Some  Eighteenth 
Century  Men  of  Letters,  by  Whitewell  Elwin  (London,  Murray, 


READING   GUIDE  481 

1902);  English  Literature  and  Society  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen  (London,  1904). 

JONATHAN  SWIFT.  Texts.— Works,  ed.  T.  Scott  (Bell);  Selections,  ed.  C. 
T.  Winchester  (Ginn);  Selections,  ed.  H.  Craik  (Clarendon  Press); 
Selections,  in  Carisbrooke  Library;  Journal  to  Stella,  ed.  G.  A.  Aitken 
(Putnam) ;  Selected  Letters,  in  Eighteenth  Century  Letters  and  Letter- 
Writers,  ed.  R.  B.  Johnson;  Gulliver's  Travels,  in  Everyman's  Library; 
Tale  of  a  Tub,  and  The  Battle  of  Books,  in  Everyman's  Library; 
Selections,  ed.  Prescott  (Holt,  1901). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  C.  Collins  (Chatto  and  Win- 
dus);  Life,  by  H.  Craik  (Murray);  Life,  by  L.  Stephen  (English  Men 
of  Letters) ;  Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson  (for  edition  see  under  Milton).  Es- 
says, by  W.  M.  Thackeray,  in  English  Humorists;  by  A.  Dobson,  in 
Eighteenth  Century  Vignettes;  by  W.  E.  H.  Lecky  in  Leaders  of  Public 
Opinion. 

JOSEPH  ADDISON.  Texts. — Works,  ed.  H.  G.  Bohn  (Bohn's  British  Classics) ; 
Selections  in  Athenaeum  Press  Series,  Golden  Treasury  Series,  Camelot 
Series,  Chandos  Classics,  etc.;  Selections,  ed.  E.  B.  Reed  (Holt,  1006). 
Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  W.  J.  Courthope  (English  Men 
of  Letters);  Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson  (for  edition  see  under  Milton).  Es- 
says, by  T.  B.  Macaulay  (numerous  school  editions);  by  E.  Gosse,  in 
Among  My  Books;  by  W.  M.  Thackeray,  in  English  Humorists. 

SIR  RICHARD  STEELE.  Texts.— Selected  Essays  from  the  Tatler  and  Guard- 
ian, together  with  Macaulay's  lives  of  Steele  and  Addison  (Bangs); 
Selections,  ed.  G.  R.  Carpenter  (Athenajum  Press  Series);  The  Lover, 
and  other  papers  by  Steele  and  Addison,  in  Camelot  Series;  Steele's 
Plays,  ed.  G.  A.  Aitken  (Mermaid  Series). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  G.  A.  Aitken  (London,  1889); 
Life,  by  A.  Dobson  (English  Worthies).  See  Thackeray's  English 
Humorists,  and  "Steele's  Letters,"  in  A.  Dobson's  Eighteenth  Cen- 
tury Vignettes. 

LORD  CHESTERFIELD. — Letters  to  his  Son,  ed.  C.  Strachey  (Putnam),  also 
in  Camelot  Series,  and  in  Eighteenth  Century  Letters,  vol.  II,  ed.  R. 
B.  Johnson  (New  York,  1898);  Life,  by  W.  H.  Craig  (Lane,  1907). 
Essay,  by  J.  C.  Collins,  in  Essays  and  Studies,  and  by  Sainte-Beuve 
in  English  Portraits  (Holt). 

ALEXANDER  POPE.  Texts. — Works  by  W.  Elwin  and  'W.  J.  Courthope; 
Poetical  Works,  ed.  A.  W.  Ward,  Globe  edition;  Rape  of  the  Lock, 
and  Essay  on  Man,  in  Eclectic  English  Classics  (American  Book  Co., 
1898);  Rape  of  the  Lock,  in  Riverside  Literature  Series  (Houghton 
Mifflin,  1901);  Essay  on  Man,  ed.  M.  Pattison  (Clarendon  Press); 
Satires  and  Epistles,  ed.  M.  Pattison  (Clarendon  Press);  Pope's  Iliad, 
books  i,  6,  22-24  (numerous  school  editions);  Selections  from  Poetical 
Works,  in  Canterbury  Poets  Series;  Letters,  in  English  Letters  and 
Letter- Writers  of  the  Eighteenth  Century,  ed.  H.  Williams  (Bell). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  L.  Stephen  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson  (for  edition  see  under  Milton).  Essays, 
by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  hi  a  Library;  by  Sainte-Beuve,  in  English 


482  READING   GUIDE 

Portraits;  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  My  Study  Windows;  by  T.  De  Quincey, 
in  Biographical  Essays,  and  also  in  his  Essays  on  the  Poets;  by  W.  S. 
Lilly,  in  Essays  and  Speeches.  See  also  W.  M.  Thackeray's  English 
Humorists;  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  Poets;  and  J.  Warton's  Genius 
and  Writings  of  Pope;  Mr.  Pope,  His  Life  and  Times,  by  E.  M.  Symonds 
(London.  1909). 

CHAPTER  XI:  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  NOVEL.    (SEE  P.  493) 

CHAPTER  XII:  THE  REVIVAL  OF  ROMANTICISM 

General  Works—  English  Romanticism  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  H. 
A.  Beers;  The  Beginnings  of  the  English  Romantic  Movement,  by 
W.  L.  Phelps;  English  Literature  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  by  T.  S. 
Perry;  Eighteenth  Century  Literature,  by  E.  Gosse;  Literary  History 
of  England,  by  Mrs.  Oliphant  (opening  chapters);  Two  lectures  on 
Romance,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (Princeton,  1916);  The  Peace  of  the 
Augustans,  a  Survey  of  Eighteenth  Century  Literature,  by  George 
Saintsbury  (London,  1916);  The  Romantic  Movement  in  English 
Poetry,  by  Arthur  Symons  (Button,  1909);  Some  Paradoxes  of  the 
English  Romantic  Movement,  by  W.  D.  MacClintock  (Chicago,  1003); 
The  Mid-Eighteenth  Century,  by  J.  H.  Millar,  in  Periods  of  English 
Literature  Series  (Scribner,  1002). 

JAMES  THOMSON.  Texts. — The  Seasons  and  Castle  of  Indolence,  ed.  H. 
E.  Greene  (Athenaeum  Press  Series);  Works,  Aldine  edition. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  W.  Bayne  (Scribner);  "Thom- 
son and  Cowper,"  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English  Poets. 
WILLIAM  COLLINS.— Works,  Aldine  edition.     Essay  in  Swinburne's  Miscel- 
lanies. 
EDWARD  YOUNG. — Works,  Aldine  edition.     Essay  by  George  Eliot,  "  World- 

liness  and  Other  Worldliness." 

THOMAS  GRAY.  Texts— Works  in  Verse  and  Prose,  ed.  E.  Gosse  (Macmil- 
lan);  Poems,  in  Routledge's  Pocket  Library;  Poems  of  Gray,  Beattie, 
and  Collins,  in  Chandos  Classics  (Warne);  Poems,  in  the  Belles  Lettres 
Series  (1914);  Correspondence  of  Gray,  Walpole,  West,  and  Ashton 
(Oxford,  1915);  Selections  from  Gray,  ed.  W.  L.  Phelps  (Athenaeum 
Press). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  E.  Gosse  (English  Men  of  Let- 
ters); Life,  by  Dr.  Johnson  (for  edition  see  under  Johnson).  Essays, 
by  M.  Arnold,  in  Essays  in  Criticism;  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Latest  Lit- 
erary Essays;  by  A.  Dobson,  in  Eighteenth  Century  Vignettes;  by  L. 
Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library.  See  also  The  Influence  of  Old  Norse 
Literature  upon  English  Literature,  by  C.  H.  Nordby  (Macmillan). 
THOMAS  PERCY.— Reliques  of  Ancient  English  Poetry,  in  Chandos  Clas- 
sics (Wame);  in  Bonn's  Standard  Library;  in  Everyman's  Library. 
Percy:  Prelate  and  Poet,  by  Alice  C.  C.  Gaussin  (London,  1908). 
More  recent  ballad  collections,  taken  from  Percy  and  other  sources, 
are:  The  Ballad  Book,  ed.  W.  Allingham;  Old  English  Ballads,  edited 
with  valuable  preface,  by  F.  B.  Gummere  (Athenaeum  Press  Series). 


KEADING   GUIDE  4^3 

See,  besides  general  works  above,  "The  Revival  of  Ballad  Poetry  in 
the  Eighteenth  Century,"  in  J.  W.  Hales's  Folia  Litteraria. 

JAMES  MACPHERSON. — Ossian,  in  Canterbury  Poets.  See  Beers's  English 
Romanticism,  etc.  Life,  by  J.  S.  Smart  (London,  1905). 

THOMAS  CHATTERTON. — Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  H.  D.  Roberts  (1006); 
Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  Sir  Sidney  Lee  (1909);  Poetical  Works,  in  Can- 
terbury Poets.  Life,  by  Sir  D.  Wilson  (Macmillan).  Life,  by  Charles 
Edward  Russell  (New  York,  1908).  Essay,  by  D.  Masson,  in  Essays 
Biographical  and  Critical. 

SAMUEL  JOHNSON.  Texts. — Essays,  selected  and  edited  by  G.  B.  Hill 
(Dent);  Essays,  selected,  in  Camelot  Series;  Rasselas,  ed.  G.  B.  Hill 
(Clarendon  Press) ;  Rasselas,  ed.  H.  Morley,  in  Morley's  Universal  Li- 
brary; Letters,  ed.  G.  B.  Hill  (Clarendon  Press);  Letters,  selected,  in 
Eighteenth  Century  Letters,  ed.  R.  B.  Johnson  (New  York,  1898); 
Lives  of  the  English  Poets,  in  Oxford  English  Classics  (Oxford,  1905); 
Six  Chief  Lives  from  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets,  with  Macaulay's 
Life  of  Johnson,  ed.  M.  Arnold  (Macmillan). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  L.  Stephen  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson,  ed.  G.  B.  Hill  (Macmillan);  Bos- 
well's  Life  of  Johnson,  in  Everyman's  Library,  4  vols.  Dr.  Johnson, 
his  Friends  and  Critics,  by  G.  B.  Hill  (Smith  Elder);  Essay,  by  L. 
Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library,  and  by  T.  B.  Macaulay;  Dr.  Johnson 
and  His  Circle,  by  J.  C.  Bailey,  in  Home  University  Library  (Holt); 
Six  Essays  on  Johnson,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (Oxford,  1910). 

OLIVER  GOLDSMITH.  Texts. — Poems,  Plays,  and  Essays,  ed.  J.  Aikin  and 
H.  T.  Tuckerman  (Crowell);  Works,  ed.  by  J.  W.  M.  Gibbs,  in  Bohn's 
Standard  Library;  Miscellaneous  Works,  ed.  D.  Masson,  Globe  edi- 
tion; Vicar  of  Wakefield,  Poems,  and  Plays,  in  Morley's  Universal 
Library;  The  Goldsmith  Anthology,  ed.  E.  Arber  (Frowde);  Plays,  in 
Temple  Classics  (London,  1911);  Selected  Essays,  in  English  Literature 
for  School  Series  (Cambridge,  1910);  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  in  Everyman's 
Library. 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  W.  Black  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  A.  Dobson  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  J.  Forster. 
Essays,  by  A.  Dobson,  in  his  Miscellanies,  by  T.  De  Quincey,  in  Es- 
says on  the  Poets;  by  T.  B.  Macaulay.  See  also  Thackeray's  English 
Humorists. 

RICHARD  BRIXSLEY  SHERIDAN. — Plays,  ed.  R.  Dircks,  in  Camelot  Series; 
Plays,  in  Morley's  Universal  Library,  and  in  Macmillan's  Library  of 
English  Classics;  Plays,  in  Everyman's  Library;  The  Rivals,  in  River- 
side Literature  Series  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1910);  The  School  for  Scan- 
dal, in  the  Temple  Dramatists  (London,  1911).  Life,  by  L.  C.  Sanders 
(Great  Writers),  and  by  M.  O.  W.  Oliphant  (English  Men  of  Letters). 

EDWARD  GIBBON.  Texts. — Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  ed. 
J.  B.  Bury  (Methuen);  Student's  Gibbon,  abridged  (Murray);  Mem- 
oirs, with  essay  by  W.  D.  Howells  (Osgood);  Memoirs,  ed.  G.  B. 
Hill  (Methuen);  Memoirs,  in  Carisbrooke  Library  and  in  Athenaeum 
Press  Series. 


4«4  READING   GUIDE 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  J.  C.  Morison  (English  Men  of 
Letters).  Essays,  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies;  by  F.  Harri- 
son, in  Ruskin,  Mill  and  other  literary  estimates;  by  C.  A.  Sainte- 
Beuve,  in  English  Portraits. 

EDMUND  BURKE.  Texts.— Select  Works,  ed.  E.  J.  Payne  (Clarendon  Press 
Series);  Selections,  ed.  B.  Perry  (Holt);  American  Speeches  and  Letters 
on  the  Irish  Question,  in  Morley's  Universal  Library.  Essay  on  the 
Sublime  and  the  Beautiful,  Temple  Classics  (Macmillan);  Orations  and 
Essays,  in  World's  Great  Books  Series  (Appleton,  1000);  Speeches  and 
Letters,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Speeches  on  America,  in  Temple 
Classics  (London,  1906). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  Morley  (English  Men  of 
Letters).  See  E.  Dowden's  French  Revolution  and  English  Literature. 
Political  Philosophy  of  Burke,  by  John  MacCunn  (London,  1913). 
GEORGE  CRABBE.  Texts.— Life  and  'Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  his  son  (Lon- 
don, 1901);  Poems,  in  Cambridge  English  Classics  (Cambridge,  1907); 
Selections,  ed.  by  A.  Deane  (1903);  Selected  Poems,  in  Cassell's  Na- 
tional Library,  and  in  Canterbury  Poets;  The  Borough,  in  Macmillan's 
Temple  Classics. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Alfred  Ainger,  in  English  Men  of 
Letters  Series;  George  Crabbe  and  His  Times,  by  Ren6  Huchon,  tr. 
from  the  French  (London,  Murray,  1007).  Life,  by  T.  E.  Kebbel 
(Great  Writers).  Essays,  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  Makers  of  Litera- 
ture; by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in 
Essays  in  English  Literature,  1780-1860. 

WILLIAM  COWPER.  Texts. — Complete  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  H.  S.  Mil- 
ford  (1905);  Poems,  ed.  by  J.  C.  Bailey  (1005);  Poetical  Works,  in 
Globe  edition,  in  Aldine  edition;  Selected  Poems,  in  Athenaeum  Press 
Series,  and  in  Canterbury  Poets;  Letters,  ed.  Thomas  Wright  (1004); 
Letters,  ed.  by  J.  G.  Frazer  (1912);  Selections  from  Cowper's  letters, 
ed.  by  E.  V.  Lucas  (1911). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Goldwin  Smith  (English  Men 
of  Letters);  Life,  by  R.  Southey.  Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in 
a  Library;  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies;  by  C.  A.  Sainte-Beuve, 
in  English  Portraits;  by  A.  Dobson,  in  Eighteenth  Century  Vignettes; 
Bunyan,  Cowper,  and  Channing,  in  G.  E.  Woodberry's  Makers  of 
Literature. 

WILLIAM  BLAKE.  Texts.— Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  James  Sampson  (Oxford, 
1905);  Poetical  Works  (London,  Chatto  &  Windus,  1006);  Poems,  with 
memoir  by  W.  M.  Rossetti,  Aldine  edition;  Poems,  with  specimens  of 
prose  writings,  in  Canterbury  Poets;  Complete  Works,  with  elaborate 
critical  apparatus  and  illustrations  from  Blake's  Prophetical  Books, 
ed.  E.  J.  Ellis  and  W.  B.  Yeats  (London,  1893);  Selections,  ed.  by  F. 
E.  Pierce  (Yale  University  Press,  1915);  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell, 
and  a  Song  of  Liberty  (London,  1911);  Letters,  with  Life,  by  Frederick 
Tatham  (London,  1906). 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  G.  K.  Chesterton  (Dutton,  1910); 
Life,  by  Basil  de  Selincourt  (Scribner,  1909);  Life,  by  Irene  Langridge 


READING   GUIDE  485 

(London,  Bell,  1904);  Life,  by  J.  E.  Ellis  (London,  Chatto  &  Windus, 
1907);  Life,  by  Arthur  Symons  (Button,  1907);  Life,  by  A.  Gilchrist 
(Macmillan);  Life,  by  A.  T.  Story  (London,  1893);  William  Blake,  a 
Critical  Study,  by  A.  C.  Swinburne  (Chatto  &  Windus).  Essay, 
by  A.  C.  Benson,  in  his  Essays;  Essay,  in  Studies  in  Poetry,  by  A.  S. 
Brooke  (Putnam,  1007). 

ROBERT  BURNS.  Texts. — Poetical  Works,  with  introduction  by  W.  E. 
Henley  (Houghton  Mifflin);  also  in  Aldine  edition,  in  Clarendon 
Press  Series,  and  in  Canterbury'  Poets;  Representative  Poems,  ed.  by 
C.  L.  Hanson,  in  Standard  English  Classics  (Ginn,  1902);  Letters, 
selected,  in  Camelot  Series. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  W.  E.  Henley  (see  Cambridge 
edition,  above;  also  published  separately);  Life,  by  J.  C.  Shairp  (Eng- 
lish Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  G.  Setoun  (Scribner);  Life,  by  T.  F. 
Henderson,  in  Oxford  Biographies  (Oxford,  1004).  Essays,  by  T. 
Carlyle  (a  convenient  edition  is  included  in  Longman's  English  Classics) ; 
by  R.  L.  Stevenson,  in  Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books;  by  W.  H. 
Thorne,  in  Modern  Idols;  by  Stopford  Brooke,  in  Theology  in  the 
English  Poets;  by  J.  Forster,  in  Great  Teachers.  Burns  and  the  Old 
English  Ballads,  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Lectures  on  the  English  Poets;  Robert 
Burns,  How  to  Know  Him,  W.  A.  Nielson  (Bobbs-Merrill). 

CHAPTER  XIII:  THE  TRIUMPH  OF  ROMANTICISM 

General  Works. — English  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,  by  H. 
A.  Beers;  Nineteenth  Century  Literature,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury;  The 
French  Revolution  and  English  Literature,  by  E.  Dowden;  Studies  in 
Literature,  1789-1877,  by  E.  Dowden;  Literary  History  of  England, 
by  Mrs.  Oliphant;  Studies  in  Poetry,  by  A.  S.  Brooke  (Putnam,  1907); 
English  Poets  and  the  National  Ideal,  by  Ernest  de  Selincourt  (Oxford 
University  Press,  1915);  The  French  Revolution  and  the  English  Poets, 
by  A.  E.  Hancock  (Holt,  1809);  The  Romantic  Movement  in  English 
Poetry,  by  Arthur  Symon«  (Button,  1909),  Survey  of  English  Litera- 
ture, 1780-1830,  by  Oliver  Elton  (London,  1912),  The  Age  of  Words- 
worth, by  C.  H  Herford  (London,  Bell,  1897);  The  Romantic  Tri- 
umph, by  T.  S.  Omond  (London,  Blackwoods  1909);  The  Romantic 
Revolt,  by  C.  E.  Vaughan  (Scribner,  1907);  A  Group  of  English  Essay- 
ists of  the  Early  Nineteenth  Century,  by  C.  T.  Winchester  (Macmil- 
lan, 1910);  Victorian  Poets,  by  E.  C  Stedman. 

SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE.  Texts. — Complete  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by 
E.  H.  Coleridge  (Oxford,  1912);  Poetical  Works,  ed  R.  Garnett,  in 
Muses'  Library;  Poetical  Works,  ed.  J.  D  Campbell  (Macmillan); 
also  in  Aldine  edition,  Athenaeum  Press  Series,  and  Canterbury  Poets; 
Selections  from  prose  writings,  ed.  C.  M.  Gayley  (Ginn);  ed.  H.  A. 
Beers  (Holt);  Lectures  on  Shakespeare  and  other  English  Poets  (Bonn's 
Standard  Library);  Biographia  Literaria,  in  Everyman's  Library; 
Essays  and  Lectures  on  Shakespeare,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Literary 
Criticism  (Oxford,  1908);  Selections,  ed.  by  Arthur  Symons  (1905); 
Selections,  ed.  by  Edward  Dowden  (1907). 


486  READING   GUIDE 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  H.  D.  Traill  (English  Men  of 
Letters).  Essays,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Democracy  and  Other  Addresses; 
bv  E  Dowden,'in  New  Studies  in  Literature;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in 
Essays  in  English  Literature,  1780-1860;  by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  The  Spirit 
of  the  Age;  by  W.  Pater,  in  Appreciations;  by  G.  E.  Woodbeny.  in 
Makers  of  Literature;  by  Stopford  Brooke,  in  Theology  in  the  English 
Poets;  by  A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Essays  and  Studies;  by  J.  Forster,  in 
Great  Teachers.  See  also  "My  First  Acquaintance  with  Poets,"  by 
W.  Hazlitt,  and  notices  of  Coleridge  in  the  writings  of  De  Quincey. 
WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH.  Texts—  Poetical  Works  and  Life,  ed.  Knight 
(1889);  Poetical  Works,  with  introduction  by  J.  Morley,  Globe  edi- 
tion; Aldine  Edition;  Selections,  with  essay  by  M.  Arnold,  in  Golden 
Treasury  Series;  Selections,  ed.  E.  Dowden  (Ginn);  Longer  Poems, 
in  Everyman's  Library;  Shorter  Poems,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Liter- 
ary Criticism,  with  an  introduction  by  N.  C.  Smith  (1905).  Selec- 
tions from  prose  writings,  ed.  C.  M.  Gayley  (Ginn);  Prefaces  and 
Essays  on  Poetry,  ed.  A.  J.  George  (Heath);  Wordsworth's  Prose,  ed. 
Grosart  (London,  1876). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  in  2  vols.,  by  G.  M.  Harper  (Scribner, 
1916);  Life,  Letters,  and  Journals,  in  2  vols.,  by  G.  Ticknor  (New  York, 
1909);  Life,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (London,  Arnold,  1903);  Words- 
worth and  the  English  Lake  Country,  by  E.  S.  Robertson  (Appleton, 
1911);  Introduction  to  Life  and  Works,  by  C.  Punch  (1907);  Words- 
worth and  his  Circle,  by  D.  Ranme  (1907);  Wordsworth,  Poet  of 
Nature,  and  Poet  of  Man,  by  E.  H.  Sneath  (New  York,  1912);  Life, 
by  F.  W.  H  Myers  (English  Men  of  Letters),  Early  Life  a  study  of 
the  Prelude,  by  E.  Legouis,  translated  by  J.  M.  Matthews  (Dent). 
A  Primer  ot  Wordsworth,  by  L.  Magnus  (Methuen);  Helps  to  the 
Study  of  Arnold's  Wordsworth,  by  R  Wilson  (Macmillan).  Essays, 
by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Among  My  Book?,  and  in  Democracy  and  Other 
Addresses;  by  W.  Pater,  in  Appreciations;  by  R.  H.  Hutton,  in  Liter- 
ary Essays,  and  in  Essays  Theological  and  Literary;  by  L.  Stephen, 
in  Hours  in  a  Library;  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  and  Browning,  by  W. 
Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies;  by  R.  W.  Church,  in  Dante  and  Other 
Essays;  by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  The  Spirit  of  the  Age. 

ROBERT  SOUTHEY.     Texts — Poetical  Works  (Crowell);  Selections,  in  Can- 
terbury Poets,  and  Golden  Treasury  Series;  Life  of  Nelson,  in  Mor- 
ley's  Universal  Library,  hi  Temple  Classic?  (Dent),  and  in  English 
Classics  (Longmans);  Poems,  ed.  by  M.  H.  Fitzgerald  (Oxford,  1909). 
Biography  and  Criticism — Life,  by  E    Dowden  (English  Men  of 
Letters).    Essay,  by  G   E   Saintsbury,  in  Studies  in  English  Litera- 
ture, 1780-1860,  ad  series;  by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  The  Spirit  of  the  Age. 
THOMAS   CAMPBELL.— Poetical  Works,   Aldine   edition.    Life,   by  J.   C. 
Hadden  (Scribner).     Essay,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Studies  in  English 
Literature,  1780-1860,  2d  series. 

GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON.  Texts.— Complete  Poetical  Works 
(Macmillan,  1907);  Poems  and  Plays.  5  vols  .  in  Everyman's  Library; 
Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  E.  H.  Coleridgt  (1905);  Lttters  and  Journals, 


READING   GUIDE  487 

ed.  T.  Moore  (Murray);  Selections,  with  essay  by  M.  Arnold,  in  Golden 
Treasury  Series;  Selections,  ed.  F.  I.  Carpenter  (Holt);  Letters,  in 
Camelot  Series. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  Nichol  (English  Men  of  Let- 
ters); Life,  by  R.  Noel  (Great  Writers).  Essays,  by  M.  Arnold,  in 
Essays  in  Criticism  (same  as  that  prefixed  to  Selections,  above);  by 
W.  Hazlitt,  in  The  Spirit  of  the  Age;  by  T.  B.  Macaulay,  in  his  Es- 
says. Essay,  by  George  Brandes,  in  Main  Currents  of  Nineteenth  Cen- 
tury Literature,  vol.  4. 

PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY.  Texts. — Poetical  Works,  ed.  E.  Dowden,  Globe 
edition;  Poetical  Works,  ed.  G.  E.  Woodberry,  Cambridge  edition; 
Poetical  Works,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Poems,  ed.  by  C.  D.  Locock 
(London,  Methuen,  1911);  The  Cenci,  ed.  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  the 
Belles  Lettres  Series  (Heath,  1909);  Selections,  in  Golden  Treasury 
Series  and  in  Heath's  English  Classics;  Essays  and  Letters,  in  Camelot 
Series.  Letters,  ed.  by  Roger  Ingpen  (Putnam,  1909). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  W.  Sharp  (Great  Writers) ;  Life, 
by  J.  A.  Symonds  (English  Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  E.  Dowden 
(Kegan  Paul).  A  Shelley  Primer,  by  H.  S.  Salt  (London,  1887). 
Essays,  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  Makers  of  Literature;  by  W.  Bagehot, 
in  Literary  Studies;  by  M.  Arnold,  in  Essays  in  Criticism;  by  R.  H. 
Hutton,  in  Literary  Essays,  and  in  Essays  Theological  and  Literary; 
by  J.  Forster,  in  Great  Teachers;  Shelley,  Godwin,  and  their  Circle, 
by  H.  N.  Brailsford,  in  the  Home  University  Library  (Holt,  1913); 
Essay,  by  Francis  Thompson  (London,  1900);  Essay,  by  George 
Brandes,  in  Main  Currents  of  Nineteenth  Century  Literature,  vol.  4; 
Shelley,  the  Man  and  the  Poet,  by  B.  A.  Glutton  (1910). 

THOMAS  MOORE. — Poetical  Works,  in  Chandos  Classics  (Warne),  and  in 
Canterbury  Poets.  Life  and  Works,  by  A.  J.  Symington  (Harper); 
Selected  Poems,  ed.  by  C.  L.  Falkiner,  in  the  Golden  Treasury  Series 
(1905);  Life,  by  S.  L.  Gwynn,  in  English  Men  of  Letters  Series;  Essay, 
by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Essays  in  English  Literature,  1780-1860. 

LEIGH  HUNT.  Texts. — Essays,  with  introduction  by  A.  Symons,  in  Cam- 
elot Series;  Dramatic  Essays,  selected  and  edited  by  W.  Archer  and 
R.  W.  Lowe  (Scott);  Selections  from  prose  and  verse,  Cavendish  Li- 
brary (Warne);  Stories  from  the  Italian  Poets,  Knickerbocker  Nuggets 
Series  (Putnam).  Selections  in  Prose  and  Verse,  ed.  by  J.  H.  Lobban, 
in  Cambridge  Literature  for  Schools  Series  (Cambridge,  University 
Press,  1909). 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Lite,  by  W.  C.  Monkhouse  (Great 
Writers).  Essays,  by  T.  B.  Macaulay;  by  G.  E.  SainCsbury,  in  Essays 
in  English  Literature,  1780-1860;  in  W.  Hazlitt's  Spirit  of  the  Age. 

JOHN  KEATS.  Texts.— Poetical  Works,  with  letters,  ed.  H.  E.  Scudder, 
Cambridge  edition;  Poetical  Works,  with  life  by  Lord  Houghton, 
Aldine  edition;  Poems,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Poetical  Works,  ed. 
by  W.  T.  Arnold,  Globe  edition  (Macmillan,  1907);  Poems,  in  2  vols., 
ed.  by  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  (1915);  Selected  poems,  ed.  by  Arthur  Symons 
(1907);  Poems  (not  quite  complete),  ed.  Palgrave,  in  Golden  Treasury 


488  READING   GUIDE 

Series;  Poems,  ed.  A.  Bates  (Athenaeum  Press  Series);  Letters,  ed.  H. 
B.  Forman. 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  S.  Colvin  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  W.  M.  Rossetti  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  A.  E.  Han- 
cock. Essays,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Among  My  Books;  by  M.  Arnold, 
in  Essays  in  Criticism;  by  A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Miscellanies;  by  W.  H. 
Hudson,  in  Studies  in  Interpretation;  by  D.  Masson,  in  Wordsworth, 
Shelley,  Keats,  and  Other  Essays. 

CHARLES  LAMB.  Texts.— Poems,  Plays,  and  Miscellaneous  Essays,  ed.  A. 
Ainger  (Macmillan);  Essays  of  Elia,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Tales 
from  Shakespeare,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Works  of  Charles  and 
Mary  Lamb,  2  vols.  (Oxford,  1908);  Essays  of  Elia,  in  Camelot  Classics; 
Dramatic  Essays,  with  introduction  by  Brander  Matthews  (Dodd, 
Mead);  Specimens  of  English  Dramatic  Poets,  in  Bohn's  Antiquarian 
Library;  Tales  from  Shakespeare,  Riverside  Library  (Hough ton 
Mifflin). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  E.  V.  Lucas,  2  vols.  (Oxford,  1008); 
Sidelights  on  Charles  Lamb,  by  Bertram  Dobell  (Scribner,  1903); 
Life,  by  A.  Ainger  (English  Men  of  Letters).  Mary  and  Charles 
Lamb,  by  W.  C.  Hazlitt  (1874);  Essays,  by  T.  De  Quincey,  in  Bi- 
ographical Essays;  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  Makers  of  Literature;  by 
W.  Pater,  in  Appreciations;  "Lamb  and  Wither,"  in  A.  C.  Swinburne's 
Miscellanies;  "Lamb  and  Keats,"  in  F.  Harrison's  Ruskin,  Mill,  and 
other  Literary  Estimates. 

WILLIAM  HAZLITT.  Texts.— Works,  ed.  W.  E.  Henley  (Dent,  1902-4). 
Essays,  selected,  in  Camelot  Series;  Dramatic  Essays,  selected  and 
edited  by  W.  Archer  and  R.  W.  Lov:e  (Scott);  Lectures  on  the  English 
Comic  Writers,  in  Temple  Classics  (Dent);  Characters  of  Shakespeare's 
Plays,  in  Bohn's  Standard  Library;  Selections  from  complete  works, 
with  introduction  by  A.  Ireland,  in  Cavendish  Library  (Warne);  Se- 
lected Essays,  ed.  by  Jacob  Zeitlin  (Oxford,  1913);  Table  Talk,  in 
Everyman's  Library. 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  A.  Birrell  (English  Men  of  Let- 
ters). Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library;  by  G.  E.  Saints- 
bury,  in  Essays  in  English  Literature,  1780-1860;  by  T.  De  Quincey, 
in  Essays  on  the  Poets  and  Other  English  Writers. 

THOMAS  DE  QUINCEY.  Texts. — Complete  Works,  ed.  D.  Masson  (Edin- 
burgh, 1889);  Confessions  of  an  English  Opium  Eater,  in  Temple 
Classics  (Dent),  and  in  Everyman's  Liorary;  Joan  of  Arc  and  English 
Mail  Coach,  ed.  J.  M.  Hart  (Holt);  Revolt  of  a  Tartar  Tribe,  ed.  C. 
E.  Baldwin  (Longmans);  Joan  of  Arc,  and  the  English  Mail  Coach, 
in  the  Riverside  Literature  Series  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1006);  Remi- 
niscences of  the  English  Lake  Poets,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Selections 
from  De  Quincey,  ed.  M.  H.  Turk  (Ginn,  1902);  Selections,  ed.  Bliss 
Perry  (Doubleday  &  Page). 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  D.  Masson  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  A.  H.  Japp  (London,  1879);  Life,  by  H.  S.  Salt 
(1904)-  Essays,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Essays  in  English  Literature, 


READING   GUIDE  489 

1780-1860,  ist  series;  by  D.  Masson,  in  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  Keats, 
and  other  Essays;  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library. 

WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR.  Texts. — Complete  Works,  ed.  C.  G.  Crump 
(London,  1891);  Selections  in  Golden  Treasury  series,  ed.  Colvin.  Im- 
aginary Conversations,  selected  by  H.  Ellis,  in  Camelot  Series;  Pericles 
and  Aspasia,  ed.  H.  Ellis,  in  Camelot  Series;  Select  Poems  in  Canter- 
bun'  Poets. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  S.  Colvin  (English  Men  of 
Letters).  Essays,  by  E.  Dowden,  in  Studies  in  Literature,  1780- 
1877;  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in.  Makers  of  Literature;  by  L.  Stephen, 
in  Hours  in  a  Library;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Studies  in  English 
Literature,  1780-1860,  2d  series;  by  A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Miscellanies. 

THOMAS  HOOD.  Texts. — Complete  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  W.  Jerrold 
(Oxford,  1906);  Choice  Works,  in  prose  and  verse  (Chatto,  Windus); 
Selected  Poems,  with  selected  poems  of  Leigh  Hunt,  in  Canterbury 
Poets. 

Criticism. — Essay,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Essays  in  English  Litera- 
ture, 1780-1860,  2d  series;  "Hood  and  Mrs.  Browning,"  in  W.  J. 
Dawson's  Makers  of  Modern  English;  Life,  by  Walter  Jerrold  (Lon- 
don, 1909). 

CHAPTER  XIV:  THE  VICTORIAN  ERA 

General  Works. — A  History  of  Our  Own  Times,  by  J.  M'Carthy;  Nineteenth 
Century  Literature,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury;  Victorian  Poets,  by  E.  C. 
Stedman;  An  Anthology  of  Victorian  Poetry,  by  E.  C.  Stedman;  A 
Literary  History  of  England  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,  by  Mrs. 
Oliphant;  English  Romanticism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,  by  H.  A. 
Beers.  "Victorian  Literature,"  in  E.  Do wden's  Transcripts  and  Stud- 
ies; The  Victorian  Age  in  Literature,  by  G.  K.  Chesterton,  in  Home 
University  Library  (Holt,  1913);  Studies  in  Early  Victorian  Literature, 
by  Frederic  Harrison  (London,  1906) ;  Interpretation  of  Literature,  by 
Lafcadio  Hearn,  2  vols.  (Dodd,  Mead,  1915);  Papers,  Critical  and 
Reminiscent,  by  William  Sharp  (Duffield,  1912);  The  Age  of  Tennyson, 
by  Hugh  Walker  (London,  1908);  The  Literature  of  the  Victorian  Era, 
by  Hugh  Walker  (London,  1910);  Outlines  of  Victorian  Literature,  by 
Hugh  Walker  (Cambridge,  1913);  British  Poets  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  ed.  by  C.  H.  Page  (Boston,  1904);  The  Oxford  Book  of  Vic« 
torian  Verse,  ed.  by  Sir  A.  Quiller-Couch  (Oxford,  1912). 
THOMAS  BABINGTON,  LORD  MACAULAY.  Texts. — Essays  and  Lays  oi 
Ancient  Rome,  27  essays  in  one  volume  (Longmans,  1896);  Essays 
on  Addison  and  Milton,  in  Longman's  English  Classics;  Essay  on 
Johnson,  in  Longman's  English  Classics;  Miscellaneous  Essays,  and 
the  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Critical  and  His- 
torical Essays  in  Everyman's  Library;  Selections  from  the  History  of 
England,  ed.  by  J.  W.  Bartram,  in  Longman's  English  Classics. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  A.  C.  Morison  (English  Men 
of  Letters);  Life,  by  G.  O.  Trevelyan.  Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  in 
Hours  in  a  Library;  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies;  by  F.  Harri- 


49° 


READING   GUIDE 


son.  in  Studies  in  Early  Victorian  Literature;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in 
Corrected  Impressions. 

JOHN  HENRY  NEWMAN. — Works  (Longmans);  Apologia  Pro  Vita  Sua,  m 
Everyman's  Library;  University  Subjects,  in  Riverside  Literature  Se- 
ries (Houghton  Mifflin);  Selections,  with  introductory  essay,  by  L.  E. 
Gates  (Holt). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Cardinal  Newman,  by  R.  H.  Hutton 
(Houghton  Mifflin);  Cardinal  Newman,  the  Story  of  his  Life,  by  J. 
H.  Jennings;  The  Oxford  Movement,  1833-1845,  by  R.  W.  Church 
(London,  1891).  Essays,  by  R.  H.  Hutton,  in  Modern  Guides  of 
English  Thought;  by  R.  W.  Church,  in  Occasional  Papers,  vol.  II  (six 
papers  on  Newman);  by  A.  B.  Donaldson,  in  Five  Great  Oxford  Lead- 
ers (London,  1900);  by  L.  E.  Gates  (Newman  as  a  prose  writer),  in 
Three  Studies  in  Literature  (also  prefixed  to  selections,  above);  by  W. 
S.  Lilly,  in  Essays  and  Speeches;  by  J.  Jacobs,  in  Literary  Studies. 
THOMAS  CARLYLE.  Texts. — Critical  and  Miscellaneous  Essays,  i  voL 
(Appleton,  1874);  French  Revolution,  3  vols.  (Scribner,  1896);  Life 
of  Sterling  (Scribner,  1897);  Sartor  Resartus,  and  Heroes,  in  Athenaeum 
Press  Series;  Past  and  Present,  Chartism,  and  Sartor  Resartus,  i  vol. 
(Harper);  Essay  on  Burns,  in  Longman's  English  Classics,  and  various 
other  school  editions;  Sartor  Resartus,  and  Heroes  and  Hero  Worship, 
in  Everyman's  Library;  Past  and  Present,  in  Handy  Volume  Classics 
(New  York,  Crowell,  1903) ;  Selections  from  Sartor  Resartus,  The  French 
Revolution,  and  Past  and  Present,  ed.  by  S.  B.  Hemingway  (Heath, 
1915);  History  of  Frederick  the  Great,  abridged  edition,  ed.  by  E. 
Sanderson. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  J.  A.  Froude  (Scribner);  Remi- 
niscences, ed.  Froude  (Scribner);  Reminiscences,  ed.  C.  E.  Norton; 
Life,  by  R.  Garnett  (Great  Waiters);  Life,  by  J.  Nichol  (English  Men 
of  Letters);  Life,  by  A.  S.  Arnold  (1903);  Life,  by  B.  W.  Matz  (1902); 
Life,  by  P.  Warner  (1904).  Essays,  by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  My  Study 
Windows;  by  R.  H.  Hutton,  in  Modern  Guides  of  English  Thought; 
by  F.  Harrison,  in  Studies  in  Early  Victorian  Literature;  by  J.  M. 
Robertson,  in  Modern  Humanists;  by  W.  C.  Brownell,  in  Victorian 
Prose  Masters;  by  W.  S.  Lilly,  in  Four  English  Humorists  of  the 
Nineteenth  Century;  "  Dr.  Johnson  and  Carlyle,"  in  J.  Burroughs's  In- 
door Studies. 

ALFRED,  LORD  TENNYSON.  Texts. — Works,  Globe  edition;  Works,  Cam- 
bridge edition;  Poems,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Select  Poems,  in  Belles 
Lettres  Series  (Heath,  1908);  Select  Poems,  ed.  W.  J.  Rolfe  (Houghton, 
Mifflin);  numerous  school  editions  of  The  Princess,  In  Memoriam,  etc. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life  and  Letters,  by  Hallam  Tennyson  - 
(Macmillan);  Life,  by  R.  F.  Horton  (Dent);  Life,  by  A.  Waugh  (U.  S. 
Book  Co.);  Life,  by  A.  C.  Benson  (London,  Methuen,  1004);  Life,  by 
Andrew  Lang  (London,  Blackwood,  1901):  Life,  by  T.  R.  Lounsbury 
(New  Haven,  1915);  Life,  by  Sir  A.  C.  Lyall,  in  English  Men  of  Letters 
Series;  Tennyson  and  his  Friends,  by  Hallam  Tennyson  (Macmil- 
lan, 1911).  The  Poetry  of  Tennyson,  by  Henry  van  Dyke  (Scribner); 


READING   GUIDE  49! 

Tennyson,  his  Art  and  his  Relation  to  Modern  Life,  by  Stopford 
Brooke;  Tennyson  as  a  Religious  Teacher,  by  C.  F.  G.  Masterman; 
A  Primer  of  Tennyson,  by  W.  M.  Dixon  (Methuen).  Essays,  by  E. 
Dowden,  in  Studies  in  Literature,  1780-1877;  by  R.  H.  Hutton,  in 
Literary  Essays;  by  L.  E.  Gates,  in  Studies  and  Appreciations;  by  F. 
Harrison,  in  Ruskin,  Mill,  and  other  Literary  Estimates.  See  also 
E.  C.  Stedman's  Victorian  Poets;  H.  B.  Forman's  Our  Living  Poets; 
J.  Forster's  Great  Teachers;  F.  W.  H.  Myers's  Science  and  a  Future 
Life. 

ROBERT  BROWNING.  Texts. — Political  Works,  complete  in  i  vol.,  Cam- 
bridge edition  (Hough ton  Mifflin) ;  Complete  Poetical  Works  (Macmil- 
lan,  1915);  Poetical  Works,  2  vols.  (Macmillan,  1896);  Select  Poems 
(Harper);  Principal  Shorter  Poems  (Appleton). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  G.  K.  Chesterton,  in  English  Men 
of  Letters  Series;  Life,  by  Edward  Dowden,  in  the  Temple  Biographies 
(Button,  1904);  Life,  by  W.  H.  Griffin  (London,  Methuen,  1910); 
Life,  by  W.  Sharp  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  A.  Waugh,  Westminster 
Biographies  (Small,  Maynard);  An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Brown- 
ing, by  A.  Symons  (Cassell);  same,  by  H.  Corson  (Heath);  Handbook 
to  Works  of  Browning,  by  Mrs.  Sutherland  Orr  (Bell).  Essays,  by  R. 
H.  Hutton,  in  Literary  Essays,  and  Essays  Theological  and  Literary; 
by  E.  Dowden,  in  Studies  in  Literature,  1780-1877;  by  J.  Jacobs,  in 
Literary  Studies;  by  J.  J.  Chapman,  in  Emerson  and  Other  Essays; 
by  E.  C.  Stedman,  in  Victorian  Poets.  See  also  Browning's  Criticism 
of  Life,  by  W.  F.  Revell  (Sonnenschein) ;  Browning's  Message  to  His 
Time,  by  E.  Berdoe  (Sonnenschein);  Personalia,  by  E.  Gosse  (Hough- 
ton  Mifflin);  Great  Teachers,  by  J.  Forster;  Poets  and  Problems,  by  G. 
W.  Cooke;  The  Poetry  of  Barbarism,  in  G.  Santayana's  Studies  in 
Poetry  and  Religion  (Scribner). 

ELIZABETH  BARRETT  BROWNING.  Texts. — Poetical  Works,  i  vol.  (Macmil- 
lan); Poetical  Works,  i  vol.,  Cambridge  edition;  Selections  from  Mrs. 
Browning's  Poems,  ed.  by  H.  E.  Ilersey,  in  Macmillan's  Pocket  Classics; 
Selected  Poems,  in  the  Standard  English  Classics  (Ginn). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Lifa,,  by  J.  H.  Ingram;  Essays,  by  E.  C. 
Stedftian,  in  Victorian  Poets;  by  A.  C.  Benson,  in  his  Essays;  by  G. 
B.  Smith,  in  Poets  and  Novelists. 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD.— Works  (Macmillan);  Poetical  Works,  complete  in  i 
vol.  (Macmillan);  Selected  Poems,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series;  Selec- 
tions from  Prose  Writings,  with  introductory  essay,  by  L.  E.  Gates 
(Holt);  Essays,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Poems,  in  Everyman's  Library. 
Biagrapf/y  and  Criticism.— Lite,  by  H.  W.  Paul  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Lite,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury  (Blackwood);  Life,  by  G.  W.  E. 
Russell,  in  Literary  Lives  (Scribner,  1904).  Essays,  by  R.  H.  Hutton, 
in  Literary  Essays  (Arnold's  poetry);  by  L.  E.  Gates,  in  Three  Studies 
in  Literature  (also  prefixed  to  prose  selections,  above);  by  L.  E.  Gates, 
in  Studies  and  Appreciations  (The  Return  to  Conventional  Life);  by 
R.  H.  Hutton,  in  Modern  Guides  of  English  Thought;  by  W.  C.  Brow- 
nell,  in  Victoria  Prose  Masters;  by  G.  E.  Woodberry,  in  Makers  of 


492  READING   GUIDE 

Literature;  by  F.  Harrison,  in  Ruskin,  Mill,  and  other  Literary  Esti- 
mates; by  J.  M.  Robertson,  in  Modern  Humanists;  by  J.  Jacobs,  in 
Literary  Studies;  by  W.  H.  Hudson,  in  Studies  in  Interpretation;  by 
J.  Burroughs,  in  Indoor  Studies;  by  S.  A.  Brooke,  in  Four  Victorian 
Poets;  Matthew  Arnold  and  his  Relation  to  the  Thought  of  our  Time, 
by  W.  H.  Dawson  (Putnam,  1904);  Matthew  Arnold  and  his  Poetry, 
by  F.  L.  Bickley  (1911). 

ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH. — Po«ms  and  Letters  and  Prose  Remains  (Mac- 
millan);  Selections;  Golden  Treasury  Series  and  Canterbury  Poets. 
Essay  in  S.  A.  Brooke's  Four  Victorian  Poets. 

JOHN  RUSKIN.  Texts. — Works,  Brantwood  edition,  ed.  C.  E.  Norton; 
Crown  of  Wild  Olive,  and  the  Cestus  of  Aglaia,  in  Everyman's  Library; 
Sesame  and  Lilies,  in  Everyman's  Library;  Unto  This  Last,  in  Every- 
man's Library;  Modern  Painters,  5  vols.,  New  Universal  Library  (But- 
ton, 1907);  Stones  of  Venice,  3  vols.,  New  Universal  Library  (Dut- 
ton,  1907);  Selections,  in  Riverside  Literature  Series  (Houghton  Mifflin, 
1908).  Essays  and  Letters,  selected  by  L.  G.  Hufford  (Ginn);  A  Rus- 
kin Anthology,  by  W.  S.  Kennedy  (New  York,  1886);  An  Introduction 
to  the  Writings  of  Ruskin  (selections),  by  V.  D.  Scudder  (Heath); 
Wild  Olive  and  Munera  Pulveris,  i  vol.  (U.  S.  Book  Co.);  Wild  Olive 
and  Sesame  and  Lilies,  i  vol.  (Burt). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Sir  Edward  T.  Cook,  2  vols. 
(London,  1911);  Life,  by  Frederic  Harrison,  in  English  Men  of  Letters; 
Life,  by  A.  K.  P.  Wingate,  in  Great  Writers  Series;  Works  (Longmans). 
John  Ruskin,  by  Mrs.  Meynell  (Dodd,  Mead);  Life,  by  W.  G.  Colling- 
wood  (Houghton  Mifflin);  The  Work  of  John  Ruskin,  by  C.  Waldstein 
(Harper) ;  John  Ruskin,  Social  Reformer,  by  J.  A.  Hobson  (Estes).  Es- 
says, by  W.  C.  Brownell,  in  Victorian  Prose  Masters;  by  J.  M.  Robert- 
son, in  Modern  Humanists;  by  F.  Harrison,  in  Ruskin,  Mill,  and  other 
Literary  Estimates;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Corrected  Impressions;  by 
J.  Forster,  in  Great  Teachers;  by  W.  J.  Stillman,  in  The  Old  Rome  and 
the  New,  and  Other  Essays. 

DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI.— Poetical  Works,  2  vols.,  ed.  W.  M.  Rossetti 
(London,  1901).  Life,  by  J.  Knight  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  A.  C. 
Benson,  in  English  Men  of  Letters;  Life,  by  William  Sharp  (Macmillan, 
1882);  The  Rossettis,  by  Elizabeth  Gary  (1907).  Essays,  by  A.  C. 
Swinburne,  in  Miscellanies;  by  H.  B.  Forman,  in  Our  Living  Poets;  by 
S.  A.  Brooke,  in  Four  Victorian  Poets. 

CHRISTINA  ROSSETTI.— Poetical  Works  (Macmillan,  1906);  Letters  (Scrib- 
ner,  1908).  Essays,  by  A.  Symons,  in  Studies  in  Two  Literatures; 
by  A.  C.  Benson,  in  his  Essays;  by  H.  B.  Forman,  in  Our  Living  Poets. 

WILLIAM  MORRIS.  Texts.— The  Defense  of  Guenevere  (Ellis  and  White); 
The  Earthly  Paradise,  i  vol.  (Longmans,  1896);  collected  Works,  ed. 
May  Morris  (Longmans) ;  Chief  socialistic  writings  in  William  Morris, 
Poet,  Artist,  and  Socialist  (Humboldt  Publishing  Co.). 

Biography  and  Criticism.— Life,  by  J.  W.  Mackail,  2  vols.  (Long- 
mans); Life,  by  Elizabeth  Gary  (1902);  Life,  by  Alfred  Noyes,  m  Eng- 
lish Men  of  Letters;  Wm.  Morris,  his  Art,  Writings,  and  Public  Life. 


KEAD1MO    GUIDE  493 

by  A.  Valance  (Bell).  Essays,  by  H.  B.  Forman,  in  Our  Living  Poets; 
by  W.  J.  Dawson,  in  Makers  of  Modern  English;  by  A.  Symons,  in 
Studies  in  Two  Literatures;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Corrected  Im- 
pressions; by  S.  A.  Brooke,  in  Four  Victorian  Poets.  See  also  The  In- 
fluence of  Old  Norse  Literature  upon  English  Literature,  by  C.  H. 
Nordby  (Macmillan). 

ALGERNON  CHARLES  SWINBURNE.  Texts. — Complete  Works  (Chatto  and 
Windus) ;  Poems  and  Ballads,  with  Atalanta  in  Calydon  and  Erechtheus, 
i  vol.  (Lovell) ;  Select  Poems  (Rivington) ;  Channel  Passage,  and  Other 
Poems  (London,  Chatto  &  Windus,  1904);  Selected  Poems,  ed.  by 
W.  M.  Payne,  Belles  Lettres  Series  (Heath,  1905). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  E.  Gosse  (1917);  Life,  by  G.  E. 
Woodberry,  in  Contemporary  Men  of  Letters  (1905);  A.  C.  Swinburne, 
A  Study,  by  T.  Wratislaw.  Essays,  by  H.  B.  Forman,  in  Our  Living 
Poets;  by  J.  R.  Lowell  (Swinburne's  Tragedies),  in  My  Study  Windows; 
by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Corrected  Impressions;  Critical  Study,  by  Ed- 
ward Thomas  (London,  1912). 

CHAPTERS  XI  AND  XV:  THE  NOVEL 

General  Works. — The  English  Novel,  to  Waverley  (Scribner),  by  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh;  The  Development  of  the  English  Novel,  by  W.  L.  Cross 
(Macmillan);  The  Evolution  of  the  English  Novel,  by  F.  H.  Stoddard 
(Macmillan) ;  Masters  of  the  English  Novel,  by  Richard  Burton  (Holt, 
1909);  The  Advance  of  the  English  Novel,  by  W.  L.  Phelps  (Dodd, 
Mead,  1916);  The  English  Novel,  by  George  Saintsbury  (Button,  1913); 
A  History  of  the  Novel  previous  to  the  Seventeenth  Century,  by  F. 
M.  Warren  (Holt);  The  English  Novel,  by  S.  Lanier  (Scribner);  An 
Introduction  to  the  Study  of  English  Fiction,  by  W  E.  Simonds  (Heath); 
British  Novelists  and  their  Styles,  by  D.  Masson  (Small,  1889);  The 
English  Novel  in  the  Time  of  Shakespeare,  by  J.  J.  Jusserand  (Unwin) ; 
History  of  Prose  Fiction,  revised  and  edited  by  H.  Wilson,  by  J.  C. 
Dunlop  (Bonn's  Standard  Library).  Selections  in  The  English  Novel 
before  the  Nineteenth  Century,  by  Hopkins  and  Hughes  (Gum). 

DANIEL  DEFOE.  Texts. — Novels,  ed.  Aitken  (Dent);  Early  Writings  in 
Carisbrooke  Library  (Routledge);  Poems  and  Pamphlets,  in  Arber's 
English  Garner,  vol.  VIII;  Journal  of  the  Plague  Year,  Memoirs  of  a 
Cavalier,  and  Robinson  Crusoe,  in  Everyman's  Library. 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  W.  Minto  (English  Men  of 
Letters);  Life,  by  W.  Whitten,  Westminster  Biographies  (Small,  May- 
nard).  Essay,  by  L.  Stephen,  Hours  in  a  Library;  Daniel  Defoe, 
How  to  Know  Him,  by  W.  P.  Trent  (Bobbs-Merrill,  191.6). 

SAMUEL  RICHARDSON. — Works  (Lippincott).  Pamela,  in  Everyman's  Li- 
brary. Life,  by  Austin  Dobson,  in  English  Men  of  Letters;  Life,  by  C. 
L.  Thomson  (Marshall).  Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  Hours  in  a  Library; 
by  H.  D.  Traill,  The  New  Fiction  and  Other  Essays;  by  A.  Dobson, 
Eighteenth  Century  Vignettes. 

HENRY  FIELDING.— Works,  ed.  G.  E.  Saintsbury  (Dent);  Tom  Jones  and 
Joseph  Andrews  in  Everyman's  Library.  Life,  by  A.  Dobson  (English 


494  READING  GUIDE 

Men  of  Letters).  Essays,  by  W.  M.  Thackeray,  in  English  Humorists; 
by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a  Library;  by  A.  Dobson,  in  Eighteenth  Cen- 
tury Vignettes  (Fielding's  Voyage  to  Lisbon  and  Fielding's  Library); 
by  J.  R.  Lowell,  in  Democracy  and  Other  Addresses;  by  G.  B.  Smith, 
in  Poets  and  Novelists;  Henry  Fielding,  a  Memoir,  by  G.  M.  Godden 
(London,  1910). 

TOBIAS  GEORGE  SMOLLETT. — Works,  ed.  Henley  (Scribner).  Life,  by  D. 
Hanna  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  O.  Smeaton,  Famous  Scots  Series 
(Scribner);  Thackeray's  English  Humorists,  "Hogarth,  Smollett  and 
Fielding." 

LAURENCE  STERNE. — Works,  ed.  G.  E.  Saintsbury  (Dent) ;  Tristram  Shandy, 
in  Morley's  Universal  Library  and  in  the  Temple  Classics.  Life  and 
Letters  of  Laurence  Sterne,  by  L.  Melville,  2  vols.  (1911);  Life  and 
Times  of  Laurence  Sterne,  by  W.  L.  Cross  (Macmillan,  1911);  Life, 
by  H.  D.  Traill  (English  Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  P.  Fitzgerald,  2 
vols.  (Chapman  and  Hall).  Essays,  by  W.  M.  Thackeray,  in  English 
Humorists,  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies  ("Sterne  and  Thack- 
eray"). 

HENRY  MACKENZIE. — The  Man  of  Feeling  (Dent,  1893),  also  in  CasselPs 
National  Library;  Miscellaneous  Works  (Man  of  Feeling  and  Various 
Essays)  (Harper).  See  Mrs.  Oliphant's  Literary  History  of  England, 
vol.  I. 

FRANCES  BURNEY,  MADAME  D'ARBLAY. — Evelina,  in  Everyman's  Library. 
Evelina,  ed.  by  R.  B.  Johnson,  2  vols.  (London,  Dent,  1903);  Diary  and 
Letters,  ed.  S.  C.  Woolsey;  Fanny  Burney  and  her  Friends  (selections 
from  her  diary,  etc.),  ed.  L.  B.  Seeley  (London,  1890).  Essay  by  T.  B. 
Macaulay;  Life,  by  Austin  Dobson,  in  English  Men  of  Letters. 

HORACE  WALPOLE.— The  Castle  of  Otranto,  in  King's  Classics  (London. 
Chatto  &  Windus,  1907);  Letters,  selected  and  edited  by  C.  D.  Yonge 
(Nimmo);  Last  Journals,  1771-1783,  2  vols.,  ed.  by  A.  F.  Steuart 
(Lane,  1910);  Correspondence  of  Gray,  Walpole,  West,  and  Ashton, 
ed.  by  P.  G.  Toynbee,  2  vols.  (Oxford,  1915).  Essay,  in  L.  Stephen's 
Hours  in  a  Library;  Horace  Walpole's  World,  by  A.  D.  Greenwood 
(London,  Bell,  1913). 

WILLIAM  BECKFORD.— Vathek,  in  Cassell's  National  Library;  Life  and 
Letters  of  William  Beckford,  by  L.  S.  Benjamin  (London,  Heinemann, 
1910). 

MATTHEW  GREGORY  LEWIS.— The  Monk  (Dutton,  1907);  The  Bravo  of 
Venice,  in  Cassell's  National  Library;  Tales  of  Terror  and  Wonder,  in 
Morley's  Universal  Library;  Selections  in  Saintsbury's  Tales  of  Mys- 
tery, vol..  I  (London,  1891).  . 

ANN  RADCLIFFE.— See  Saintsbury's  Tales  of  Mystery,  vol.  I  (selections). 

WILLIAM  GODWIN. — Caleb  Williams  (Routledge,  1853).  Essays,  by  De 
Quincey,  in  Essays  on  the  Poets  and  other  Writers;  by  L.  Stephen, 
Hours  in  a  Library  ("Godwin  and  Shelley");  by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  The 
Spirit  of  the  Age.  Wm.  Godwin:  his  Friends  and  Contemporaries,  2 
vols.  (Roberts);  Shelley,  Godwin  and  their  Circle,  by  H.  N.  Brailsford, 
in  Home  University  Library  (Holt,  1913). 


READING   GUIDE  495 

MARIA  EDGEWORTH. — Novels  (Dent,  1893);  Castle  Rackrent  and  The 
Absentee,  in  Morley's  Universal  Library.  Life  and  Letters,  by  A.  J. 
C.  Hare,  2  vols.  (Arnold);  Maria  Edgeworth,  by  Helen  Zimmerman 
(Roberts) ;  Life,  by  Emily  Lawless,  in  English  Men  of  Letters;  Maria 
Edgeworth  and  her  Circle,  by  Constance  Hill  (Lane,  1910);  The  Edge- 
worths,  by  Alice  Paterson  (London,  1914).  Essay,  in  Mrs.  A.  T. 
Ritchie's  A  Book  of  Sibyls  (Smith  Elder). 

JANE  AUSTEN. — Works,  ed.  R.  B.Johnson  (Dent);  Novels, in  Everyman's 
Library;  Letters,  selected  and  edited  by  S.  C.  Woolsey  (Roberts). 
Life,  by  F.  W.  Cornish,  in  the  English  Men  of  Letters  Series;  Jane 
Austen,  Criticism  and  Appreciation,  by  P.  Fitzgerald  (1912);  Jane 
Austen  and  her  Country  House  Comedy,  by  W.  H.  Helm  (1909); 
Jane  Austen  and  her  Times,  by  G.  E.  Mitton  (1905).  Life,  by  Gold- 
win  Smith  (Scott);  Life,  by  O.  F.  Adams  (Lee  and [Shepard) ;  Jane 
Austen,  by  W.  P.  Pollock  (Longmans);  Jane  Austen's  Novels,  by  G. 
Pellew  (Boston,  1883);  Essays  on  the  Novel,  as  illustrated  by  Scott  and 
Miss  Austen,  by  A.  A.  Jack  (Macmillan).  Essay,  in  Mrs.  Ritchie's  A 
Book  of  Sibyls. 

SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. — Life,  by  R.  H.  Hutton  (English  Men  of  Letters); 
Life,  by  C.  D.  Yonge  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  W.  H.  Hudson  (Lon- 
don, 1901);  Life,  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury  (Scribner);  Life,  by  J.  G.  Lock- 
hart,  7  vols.  (Black).  Life,  by  Andrew  Lang,  in  Literary  Lives  (Scrib- 
ner, 1906).  Essays,  by  A.  C.  Swinburne,  in  Studies  in  Prose  and 
Poetry,  "The  Journal  of  Sir  Walter  Scott";  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Liter- 
ary Studies;  "The  Waverley  Novels,"  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in  a 
Library;  by  J.  C.  Shairp,  in  Aspects  of  Poetry;  by  T.  Carlyle,  in  his 
Essays;  by  G.  E.  Saintsbury,  in  Essays  in  English  Literature,  1780- 
1860,  2d  series,  "Scott  and  Dumas";  by  W.  Hazlitt,  in  The  Spirit  of 
the  Age;  Scott  and  the  Border  Minstrelsy,  by  Andrew  Lang  (1910); 
The  Waverley  Novels,  by  C.  A.  Young  (1907). 

BENJAMIN  DISRAELI,  EARL  OF  BEACONSFIELD. — Novels  and  Tales  (Long- 
mans); Life,  by  Monypenny,  6  vols.  (Macmillan,  1910);  Lord  Beacons- 
field;  A  Study,  by  George  Brandes;  The  Earl  of  Beaconsfield,  by  H.  E. 
Gorst,  Victorian  Era  Series  (Blackie);  Essays,  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours 
in  a  Library;  F.  Harrison,  in  Early  Victorian  Literature. 

EDWARD  BULWER,  LORD  LYTTON. — Novels,  Knebsworth  ed.  (Routledge); 
Dramatic  Works  (Routledge).  Life,  by  V.  A.  G.  R.  Lytton  (1913); 
Essays,  by  W.  W.  Senior,  Essays  in  Fiction  (Longmans). 

CHARLES  DICKENS. — Life,  by  J.  Forster,  2  vols.  (Chapman  and  Hall); 
Life,  by  F.  T.  Marzials  (Great  Writers);  Life,  by  A.  W.  Ward  (English 
Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  O.  Ellison  (1908);  Charles  Dickens,  A  Critical 
Study,  by  G.  R.  Gissing  (Dodd,  Mead).  Essays,  by  F.  Harrison,  in 
Early  Victorian  Literature;  by  W.  Bagehot,  in  Literary  Studies,  vol. 
II;  by  W.  S.  Lilly,  in  Four  English  Humorists  of  the  Nineteenth  Cen- 
tury; by  A.  Lang,  essay  prefixed  to  Gadshill  edition  of  Dickens  (Chap- 
•man  and  Hall);  by  G.  K.  Chesterton,  in  Appreciations  and  Criticisms 
(Dutton,  1911);  Critical  Study,  by  G.  K.  Chesterton  (Dodd,  Mead, 
1906);  The  Genius  of  Dickens,  by  George  Barlow  (1909). 


496  READING   GUIDE 

WM.  MAKEPEACE  THACKERAY.— Works,  Biographical  ea.  (Harper).  Life, 
by  Lewis  Melville,  2  vols.  (1910);  Life,  by  C.  Whibley  (1903);  Life, 
by  A.  Trollope  (English  Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  Merivale  and  Mar- 
zials  (Great  Writers).  Essays,  by  F.  Harrison,  in  Studies  in  Early 
Victorian  Literature;  by  W.  C.  Brownell,  in  Victorian  Prose  Masters; 
by  W.  S.  Lilly,  in  Four  English  Humorists  of  the  Nineteenth  Century; 
by  G.  B.  Smith,  in  Poets  and  Novelists. 

ANTHONY  TROLLOPE. — Barchester  Towers  and  several  other  novels  in 
Everyman's  Library;  Autobiography,  ed.  H.  M.  Trollope  (Harper); 
Life,  by  T.  H.  S.  Escott  (Lane,  1913).  Essays,  by  H.  James,  in 
Partial  Portraits;  by  F.  Harrison,  in  Early  Victorian  Literature. 

CHARLES  READE. — Charles  Reade:  a  memoir  compiled  chiefly  from  his 
literary  remains,  by  C.  L.  and  C.  Reade  (Chapman  Hall,  1887).  Essay, 
in  Swinburne's  Miscellanies;  Charles  Reade  as  I  knew  Him,  by  J. 
Coleman  (1003). 

CHARLOTTE  AND  EMILY  BRONTE.— Works  of  Charlotte,  Emily,  and  Anne 
Bronte  (Dent,  1893);  Haworth  edition,  ed.  Mrs.  H.  Ward  (Scribner); 
Jane  Eyre,  and  Shirley,  in  Everyman's  Library.  Life  of  Charlotte 
Bronte,  by  A.  Birrell  (Great  Writers) ;  Life  of  Charlotte  Bronte,  by  Mrs. 
Gaskell  (Appleton);  Life  of  Emily  Bronte,  by  A.  M.  F.  Robinson 
(Roberts).  A  Note  on  Charlotte  Bronte,  by  A.  C.  Swinburne  (Chatto 
&  Windus).  Essays:  Charlotte  Bronte,  by  L.  E.  Gates,  in  Studies 
and  Appreciations;  The  Bronte  Sisters,  in  Views  on  Vexed  Questions, 
W.  W.  Kinsley;  Emily  Bronte,  in  Swinburne's  Miscellanies;  Charlotte 
Bronte,  in  F.  Harrison's  Early  Victorian  Literature;  "The  Brontes," 
in  G.  B.  Smith,  Poets  and  Novelists;  The  Brontes,  by  C.  K.  Shorter, 
2  vols.  (Scribner,  1908);  Charlotte  Bronte,  the  Woman,  by  Maude 
Goldring  (1915);  The  Challenge  of  the  Brontes,  by  E.  W.  Gosse  (1903). 

CHARLES  KINGSLEY.— Works  (Macmillan);  Charles  Kingsley:  his  letters 
and  memories  of  his  life,  by  his  wife  (Macmillan,  1890).  Essays,  by 
F.  Harrison,  in  Early  Victorian  Literature;  by  L.  Stephen,  in  Hours  in 
a  Library. 

ELIZABETH  C.  S.  GASKELL. — Novels,  in  Everyman's  Library.  Critical 
paper  on  Mrs.  Gaskell's  writings  by  Prof.  W.  Minto,  in  Fortnightly 
Review,  vol.  XXIV,  July-September,  1878. 

GEORGE  ELIOT.— Life,  by  L.Stephen  (English  Men  of  Letters);  Life,  by  O. 
Browning  (Great  Writers);  Life,  3  vols.,  by  J.  W.  Cross;  George  Eliot: 
A  Critical  Study  of  Her  Life  and  Writings,  by  G.  W.  Cooke  (Osgood). 
Essays,  by  R.  H.  Hutton,  in  Modern  Guides  of  English  Thought,  and 
in  Essays  Theological  and  Literary;  by  F.  Harrison,  in  Studies  in  Early 
Victorian  Literature;  by  H.  James,  in  Partial  Portraits;  by  W.  C. 
Brownell,  in  Victorian  Prose  Masters;  by  J.  Jacobs,  in  Literary  Studies; 
by  W.  S.  Lilly,  in  Four  English  Humorists  of  the  Nineteenth  Century. 

GEORGE  MEREDITH.— Novels  (Scribner);  Poems,  selected  (Scribner); 
Essay  on  Comedy  (Scribner);  Letters,  ed.  by  his  son,  2  vols.  (Scribner, 
1912);  George  Meredith:  some  characteristics,  R.  Le  Gallienne  (Lane); 
George  Meredith:  A  study,  Hannah  Lynch  (Methuen).  Essay,  by 
W.  C.  Brownell,  in  Victorian  Prose  Masters;  by  A.  Monkhouse,  in 


READING   GUIDE  497 

Books  and  Plays;  The  Novels  of  George  Meredith,  by  E.  J.  Bailey 
(Scribner,  1907);  Aspects  of  George  Meredith,  by  R.  H.  Curie  (Button, 
1908);  George  Meredith  as  a  Poet,  by  Arthur  Symons  (1915);  .Essay, 
by  Walter  Jerrold  (1902);  The  Poetry  and  Philosophy  of  George  Mere- 
dith, by  G.  M.  Trevelyan  (London,  Constable,  1906) 

THOMAS  HARDY.— Works  (Harper).  Life,  by  H.  H.  Child,  in  Writers  of 
Today  (London,  1916);  The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,  by  L.  Johnson 
(Lane);  Thomas  Hardy,  by  Annie  Macdonnell  (Hodder  and  Stoughton, 
1804).  Essay,  by  T.  G.  Selby.  in  The  Theology  of  Modern  Fiction. 
Thomas  Hardy,  a  Critical  Study  by  Lascelles  Abercrombie  (London, 
1912). 

ROBERT  Louis  STEVENSON. — Works  (Scribner).  Letters,  ed.  S.  Colvin 
(Scribner) ;  Life,  by  G.  Balfour  (Scribner) ;  Life,  by  Margaret  N.  Black 
(Scribner);  Life,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  (London,  Arnold,  1906);  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  a  Study,  by  A[lice]  Bfrown]  (Copeland  and  Day). 
Essay,  by  H.  James,  in  Partial  Portraits;  by  J.  J.  Chapman,  in  Emer- 
son and  Other  Essays;  by  A.  Monkhouse,  in  Books  and  Plays,  "Plays 
of  Stevenson  and  Henley."  Essay,  by  Leslie  Stephen  (Putnam,  1902); 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  How  to  Know  Him,  by  R.  A.  Rice  (Bobbs- 
Merrill,  1916). 

CHAPTER  XVI 
OSCAR  WILDE. — Plays,  2  vols.  (Boston,  Luce  &  Co.,  1905);  Poetical  Works 

(Mosher,  1908);  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  N.  H.  Dole  (Crowell,  1913); 

Life,  by  L.  C.  Ingleby  (Appleton,  1908):  Life,  by  Robert  H.  Sherard 

(Brentano,  1911);  Life,  by  Frank  Harris  (New  York,  1916). 
GEORGE  MOORE. — The  Brook  Kerith  (Macmillan,  1916);  Esther  Waters 

(Duffield,  1913);  Evelyn  Innes  (Appleton,  1898);  Hail  and  Farewell, 

3  vols.  (Appleton,  1914);  The  Lake  (Appleton,  1915);  Sister  Teresa 

(Lippincott,  1901). 
Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Susan  L.  Mitchell,  in  Irishmen 

of  Today  Series  (Dodd,  Mead,  1916) .   Essay,  by  William  Archer  in  Real 

Conversations  (Heinemann,  1904). 
STEPHEN  PHILLIPS. — Herod  (Lane,  1901);  Nero  (Macmillan,  1906);  Paolo 

and  Francesca  (Lane,  1900);  Pietro  of  Siena  (Macmillan,  1910);  The 

Sin  of  David  (Macmillan,  1904);  Ulysses  (Macmillan,  1902);  Lyrics 

and  Dramas  (Lane,  1913);  New  Poems  (Lane,  1907);  Poems  (Lane, 

1902);  The  New  Inferno  (Lane,  1910). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Essay,  by  E.  E.  Hale,  in  Dramatists  of 

Today  (Holt,  1905) ;  Essay,  by  William  Archer,  in  Real  Conversations 

(Heinemann,  1904). 
WILLIAM  WATSON.— Poems,  2  vols.  (Lane,  1905);  New  Poems  (Lane,  1909); 

The  Muse  in  Exile  (Lane,  1913);  The  Man  Who  Saw,  and  Other  Poems 

(Harper,  1917);  Retrogression,  and  Other  Poems  (Lane,  1917);  Sable 

and  Purple,  and  Other  Poems  (Lane,  1910). 
FRANCIS  THOMPSON. — Works,  2  vols.  (London,  1913);    New  Poems  (Lane, 

1914);  Essay  on  Shelley  (Scribner,  1909);  A  Renegade  Poet,  and  Other 

Essays  (Boston,  1910). 


498  READING   GUIDE 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Life,  by  Everard  Meynell  (London,  1913); 
Life,  by  John  Thomson  (London,  1913).  Essay,  by  Horace  J.  Bridges, 
in  Criticisms  of  Life  (Houghton  Mifflin,  1915). 

WILLIAM  ERNEST  HENLEY. — Works,  7  vols.  (London,  D.  Nutt,  1908); 
Poems  (Scribner,  1904);  Life,  by  Leslie  Cope  Cornford  (Houghton 
Mifflin,  1913). 

JOHN  DAVIDSON. — Ballads  and  Songs  (Lane,  1895);  Fleet  Street  Eclogues 
(Lane,  1899);  New  Ballads  (Lane,  1897);  Plays  (London,  1894).  Essay, 
by  Frank  Harris,  in  Contemporary  Portraits  (Kennerley,  1915). 

JOHN  MASEFIELD.— The  Daffodil  Fields  (Macmillan,  1913);  The  Everlast- 
ing Mercy,  and  The  Widow  in  the  Bye  Street  (Macmillan,  1913);  The 
Faithful,  a  tragedy  (Macmillan,  1916);  Good  Friday,  and  Other  Poems 
(Macmillan,  1916);  Philip  the  King,  and  Other  Poems  (Macmillan, 
1915);  Salt  Water  Ballads  (1913);  The  Story  of  a  Round  House,  and 
Other  Poems  (Macmillan,  1916);  The  Tragedy  of  Nan,  and  Other  Plays 
(Kennerley,  1912);  A  Mainsail  Haul  (Macmillan,  1913);  Selected  Poems 
(Macmillan,  1917). 

HENRY  JAMES.— Novels  (Scribner,  1007);  Partial  Portraits  (Macmillan, 
1894);  Notes  on  Novelists  (Scribner,  1916);  French  Poets  and  Novel- 
ists (Macmillan,  1893);  A  Small  Boy  and  Others  (Scribner,  1914); 
Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother  (Scribner.  1914). 

Biography  and  Criticism. — Critical  Study,  by  Ford  Maddox  Hueffer 
(London,  M.  Seeker,  1913);  The  Novels  of  Henry  James,  by  Elizabeth 
L.  Cary;  Life,  by  Rebecca  West,  in  Writers  of  Today  Series  (Holt,  1916), 
Essay,  by  William  C.  Brownell,  in  American  Prose  Masters  (Scribner, 
1909);  Essay,  by  John  C.  Underwood,  in  Literature  and  Insurgency 
(Kennerley,  1914). 

MRS.  HUMPHRY  WARD.— The  Case  of  Richard  Meynell  (Doubleday,  Page, 
1911);  Eleanor  (Harper,  1900);  Fenwick's  Career  (Harper,  1906); 
Helbeck  of  Bannisdale  (Macmillan,  1899):  The  History  of  David 
Grieve  (Macmillan,  1892);  Marcella  (Macmillan,  1895);  The  Marriage 
of  William  Ashe  (Harper,  1905);  Lady  Rose's  Daughter  (Harper,  1903); 
Robert  Elsmere  (1906);  Sir  George  Tressady  (Macmillan,  1905);  The 
Testing  of  Diana  Mallory  (Harper,  1908). 

RUDYARD  KIPLING.— Writings  in  Prose  and  Verse  (Scribner,  1905);  Critical 
Study,  by  Cyril  Falls  (London,  1913);  Rudyard  Kipling,  a  Literary 
Appreciation,  by  R.  Thurston  Hopkins  (Stokes,  1916);  Rudyard  Kip- 
ling, a  Criticism,  by  Richard  Le  Gallienne  (Lane,  1900);  Life,  by  John 
Palmer,  in  Writers  of  Today  Series  (Holt,  1915).  Essay,  by  F.  T. 
Cooper,  in  Some  English  Story  Tellers  (Holt,  1912). 

JOSEPH  CONRAD.— Works  (Doubleday,  Page). 

Critical  and  Biographical.— Joseph  Conrad,  A  Study,  by  Richard 
Curie  (Doubleday,  Page,  1914);  Joseph  Conrad,  a  Study,  by  Wilson 
Follett;  Life,  by  Hugh  Walpole,  in  Writers  of  Today  Series  (Holt). 

SAMUEL  BUTLER.— Erewhon  (Dutton,  1910);  Erewhon  Revisited  (Dutton, 
1910);  The  Fair  Haven  (London,  1913);  The  Humor  of  Homer,  and 
Other  Essays  (London,  1913);  The  Note  Books  (London,  1912);  The 
Way  of  All  Flesh  (Dutton,  19x0). 


READING   GUIDE  499 

Critical  and  Biographical.—  Life,  by  John  F.  Harris  (Dodd,  Mead, 
1916);  Samuel  Butler,  a  Critical  Study,  by  Gilbert  Cannan  (London, 


ARNOLD  BENNETT.  —  Anna  of  the  Five  Towns  (Dot  an,  1911);  Buried  Alive 
(Brentano,  1910);  Clayhanger  (Button,  1910);  Hilda  Lessways  (Button, 
1911);  These  Twain  (Boran,  1915);  A  Great  Man  (Boran,  1915); 
Helen  With  the  High  Hand  (Boran,  1910)  ;  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  (1909)  ; 
How  to  Live  on  24  Hours  a  Bay  (London,  1910);  Literary  Taste  and 
How  to  Form  It  (Boran,  1910);  The  Truth  about  an  Author  (Boran, 
1911). 

Critical  and  Biographical.  —  Life,  by  F.  J.  Barton,  in  Writers  of  To- 
day Series  (Holt,  1915);  Essay,  by  F.  T.  Cooper,  in  Some  English  Story 
Tellers  (Holt,  1912). 

JOHN  GALSWORTHY.  —  Plays,  3  vols.  (London,  1914);  A  Bit  o'  Love  (Scrib- 
ner,  1915);  A  Commentary  (Putnam,  1908);  The  Country  House  (Put- 
nam, 1911);  The  Bark  Flower  (Scribner,  1913);  Fraternity  (Putnam, 
1909);  The  Freelands  (Scribner,  1915);  The  Inn  of  Tranquillity  (Scrib- 
ner, 1912);  The  Island  Pharisees  (Putnam,  1908);  The  Little  Man,  and 
Other  Satires  (Scribner,  1915);  The  Man  of  Property  (Putnam,  1906); 
A  Motley  (Scribner,  1910);  The  Patrician  (Scribner,  1911);  A  Sheaf 
(Scribner,  1916);  Villa  Rubein  (Putnam,  1908). 

Critical  and  Biographical.  —  Life,  by  Sheila  Kaye-Smith,  in  Writers 
of  Today  Series  (Holt,  1916).  Essay,  by  Edwin  Bjorkman,  in  Is  There 
Anything  New  Under  the  Sun?  (Kennerley,  1911);  Essay,  by  F.  T. 
Cooper,  in  Some  English  Story  Tellers  (Holt,  1912);  Essay,  by  P.  P. 
Howe,  in  Bramatic  Portraits  (Kennerley,  1913). 

H.  G.  WELLS.—  Ann  Veronica  (Harper,  1913);  The  History  of  Mr.  Polly 
(Buffield,  1910);  In  the  Bays  of  the  Comet  (Macmillan,  1906);  Kipps 
(Scribner,  1905);  Marriage  (Buffield,  1912);  Mr.  Britling  Sees  it 
Through  (Macmillan,  1916);  The  New  Machiavelli  (Buffield,  1910); 
The  Passionate  Friends  (Harper,  1913);  The  Research  Magnificent 
(Macmillan,  1915);  Tono-Bungay  (Buffield,  1909);  The  War  in  the  Air 
(Macmillan,  1908);  The  War  of  the  Worlds  (Harper,  1897);  The  Wife 
of  Sir  Isaac  Harman  (Macmillan,  1914);  The  Soul  of  a  Bishop  (Macmil- 
lan, 1917);  First  and  Last  Things  (Putnam,  1908);  Mankind  in  the 
Making  (London,  1903);  A  Modern  Utopia  (Scribner,  1905);  New 
Worlds  for  Old  (Macmillan,  1908);  God  the  Invisible  King  (Macmil- 
lan, 1917);  Social  Forces  in  England  and  America  (Harper,  1914); 
The  World  Set  Free  (Button,  1914). 

Critical  and  Biographical.—  Life,  by  J.  B.  Beresford,  in  Writers  of 
Today  Series  (Holt,  1915);  The  World  of  H.  G.  Wells,  by  Van  Wyck 
Brooks  (Kennerley,'  1915).  Essay,  by  E.  E.  Slosson,  in  Six  Major 
Prophets  (Little,  Brown,  1917). 

GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW.  —  Plays,  Pleasant  and  Unpleasant,  2  vols.  (Bren- 
tano, 1906);  Three  Plays  for  Puritans  (1901);  Androcles  and  the  Lion; 
Overruled;  Pygmalion  (Brentano,  1916);  Cashel  Byron's  Profession 
(1901);  The  Boctor's  Bilemma;  Getting  Married;  The  Shewing-Up  of 
Blanco  Posnet  (Brentano,  1911);  Bramatic  Opinions  and  Essays,  2 


500  READING   GUIDE 

vols.  (Brentano,  1906);  The  Irrational  Knot  (Brentano,  1905);  John 
Bull's  Other  Island;  How  He  Lied  to  Her  Husband;  Major  Barbara 
(Brentano,  1907);  Love  Among  the  Artists  (1900);  Man  and  Superman 
(1903);  Misalliance;  The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets;  Fanny's  First 
Play  (Brentano,  1914);  The  Unsocial  Socialist  (Brentano,  1911); 
The  Quintessence  of  Ibsenism  (Brentano,  1901). 

Critical  and  Biographical. — Essay,  by  Edwin  Bjorkman,  in  Is  There 
Anything  New  Under  the  Sun?  (Kennerley,  1911);  Bernard  Shaw,  The 
Man  and  the  Mask,  by  Richard  Burton  (Holt,  1916);  George  Bernard 
Shaw,  by  G.  K.  Chesterton  (Lane,  1909);  Bernard  Shaw  as  Artist- 
Philosopher,  by  Ren6e  Deacon  (Lane,  1910);  Essay,  by  E.  E.  Hale, 
in  Dramatists  of  Today  (Holt,  1911);  The  Twentieth  Century  Moliere: 
Bernard  Shaw,  by  A.  F.  Hamon  (Stokes,  1916);  Life,  by  Archibald 
Henderson  (Kennerley,  1911);  Essay,  by  Archibald  Henderson,  in 
European  Dramatists  (1913);  Bernard  Shaw,  a  Critical  Study,  by  P. 
P.  Howe  (Dodd,  Mead,  1915);  Essay,  by  P.  P.  Howe,  in  Dramatic 
Portraits  (Kennerley,  1913);  Life,  by  Holbrook  Jackson  (1907);  George 
Bernard  Shaw,  a  Critical  Study,  by  Joseph  McCabe  (Kennerley,  1914); 
Essay,  by  E.  E.  Slosson,  in  Six  Major  Prophets  (Little,  Brown,  1917). 
THE  IRISH  LITERARY  MOVEMENT. — Among  many  books  on  this  subject 
the  following  may  be  mentioned:  A  Literary  History  of  Ireland,  by 
Douglas  Hyde  (Scribner,  1899);  Ireland's  Literary  Renaissance,  by  E. 
A.  Boyd  (Lane,  1916);  Celtic  Dawn,  by  L.  R.  Morris  (Macmillan, 
1917);  W.  B.  Yeats  and  the  Irish  Literary  Revival,  by  H.  S.  Kraus 
(McClure  Phillips,  1904);  J.  M.  Synge  and  the  Irish  Theatre,  by 
Maurice  Bourgeois  (Constable,  1913);  J.  M.  Synge  and  the  Irish 
Dramatic  Movement,  by  F.  L.  Bickley  (Houghton  Mifflin  Co.,  1912); 
J.  M.  Synge,  by  John  Masefield  (Macmillan,  1915). 


INDEX 


Abbotstord,  396 

"Abou  Ben  Adhem,"  322 

Abraham,  in  miracle  plays,  107 

"Absalom  and  Achitophel,"  203 

Absentee,  The,  392 

Absolute,  Captain,  256 

Abstractions,  in  i8th  century  verse,  320 

"Abt  Vogler,"364 

Accent,  in  English  verse,  38-39,  63 

Acres,  Bob,  256 

Actions  and  Reactions,  448,  449 

Actors  and  acting,  322 

Actresses,  on  Restoration  stage,  117 

Adam,  in  miracle  plays,   106,  187;    in 

Paradise  Lost,  188 
Adam  Bede,  417,  418 
Adam  the  Scrivener,  in  Canterbury 

Tales,  54 

Adams,  Parson,  in  Joseph  Andrews,  282 
ADDISON,  JOSEPH,  223,  224,  226,  227, 

228,  229,  234,  288,  331,  392,  410;  his 

character,  224;  his  mission,  225;  his 

method  and  style,  226 
"Address  to  the  Deil"  (Burns),  268 
"Address  to  the  Irish  People,"  317 
"Adonais,"  246,  318,  320 
Advancement  of  Learning,  The,  162 
Adventurer,  The,  248 
Adventures  of  Arthur  at  the  Tarn  Wathe- 

ling,  The,  31 
"Advice  from  the  Scandalous  Club," 

223 

/Egean,  The,  313 
Aelfric,  21 
"Aella,"  245 
^Eneid,  The  (Surrey),  78 
Aeschere,  in  Beowulf,  10 
/Eschylus,  318,  353 
'Esop,  338 
Aethelings  (lords),  3 
Africa,  71 

Agincourt,  49,  100,  131 
Aguecheek,  Sir  Andrew,  133 
Alastor,  318 
Albania,  313 
Albion's  England,  100 
Alcestis,  46 

Alchemist,  The,  144,  146 
Alcibiades,  339 
Aldwinkle,  202 
Alexander  the  Great,  29,  31 
"Alexander's  Feast,"  206,  243 


Alexandria,  49,  415 

Alexandrines,  97,  100 

Alfoxden,  299,  301 

Alfred,  King,  19-21,  22 

Algrind,  in  Shepherd's  Calendar,  04 

All  for  Love,  211 

Allegory,  95,  195 

All-hallows'  day,  32 

"Allisoun,"  39 

Alliteration.  38-39,  63,  85 

Allworthy,  Mr.,  282 

Alps,  The,  6,  44,  55,  314 

Alton  Locke,  415 

Amadas,  35 

Ambassador,  The,  445 

Amelia.  282,  283,  284,  285 

America,  179,  196,  260,  261,  262,  350, 

American,  The.  445 

Amis  and  Amiloun.  31 

''Amoretti,"  93 

Analysis,  in  the  novel,  418 

Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  The,  179 

"Ancient  Mariner,  The,"  299,  300-301 

"Andrea  del  Sarto,"  365 

Andreas,  16 

Androcles  and  the  Lion,  460 

Angles,  The.  i,  5,  6.  19 

Anglo-Saxon,  i,  13,  76 

Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle,  The,  21 

Anglo-Saxon  kingdoms,  The,  8 

Anglo-Saxon  poetry,  2-5,  8-12,  13,  15- 

19.  21.  22 

Anglo-Saxons,  The,  i.  2,  7,  8,  13,  19 
Anne,  Queen  of  England,  215,  216,  233, 

243,  274-  332,  410 
Anne  of  Bohemia,  45 
Anne  Veronica,  457 
Annus  Mirabttis,  202 
Anticipations,  456 
Anticlimax,  Byron's  use  of,  316 
Antiquary.  The,  397 

Antithesis,  in  Lyly,.8s;   in  Sidney,  88 
Antony  and  Cleopatra,  139,  211 
Apollo,  185,  326 
Apollyon,  196 

Apologia  pro  Vita  Sua,  Newman's,  348 
Appeal  from  the  New  to  the  Old  Whigs, 

261 

"Appleton  House,"  176 
Arbuthnot,  230,  234 
Arbuthnot,  Epistle  to,  234 


SGI 


502  INDEX 


Arcades,  184 

Arcadia,  87 

Arcadia,  Sidney's,  86,  87,  88,  89 

Archery,  in  Toxophilus,  83 

Arcite,  52 

Arden,  Mary,  124 

Areopagitica,  186 

Ariel,  141 

ARIOSTO,  g6,  186,  322,  324 

Armour,  Jean,  269 

Arms  and  the  Man,  459 

Arno,  The,  337 

Arnold,  Dr.  Thomas,  368 

ARNOLD,  MATTHEW,  225,  320,  367,  436, 
437;  contrasted  with  Browning,  368; 
a  poet  of  transition,  368;  his  ideal  of 
form,  369;  his  prose,  370;  his  "gospel 
of  ideas,"  371;  his  criticism,  .37 2;  his 
post-romantic  point  of  view,  372 

Arqua,  44 

Artegal,  95 

Arthour  and  Merlin,  31 

Arthur,  in  The  Faerie  Queene,  95 

Arthur,  King,  7,  31,  32,  33  (in  Morte 
Darthur),  68,  186,  357,  359 

Arthurian  Legends,  The,  29,  31,  68,  186, 
357 

Artificiality  in  Elizabethan  literature, 
94,  102,  115,  127,  134,  150 

Arviragus,  140 

As  You  Like  It,  90,  133,  134 

Ascension,  The,  16 

ASCHAM,  ROGER,  83-84,  85 

Asia,  319,  335 

Asia  Minor,  339,  383 

Asolo,  362 

Asser  (bishop),  20 

Astrcea  Redux,  202 

Astrophel  and  Stella,  86 

Atalanta  in  Calydon,  337,  386 

Athens,  71,  81,  129,  339 

Atlantis,  382 

Atterbury,  410 

Atticus,  234,  254 

Auburn,  254 

Audrey,  133 

Augustan  age,  The,  239,  240,  310,  312 

Augustine,  14 

Aurengzebe,  211 

Aurora  Leigh,  367 

AUBTEN,  JANE,  393;  her  life,  393;  limi- 
tations, 394;  her  excellences,  394; 
her  realism,  395 

Austen,  Lady,  265 

Austin,  the  fair,  30 

Austria,  367 

Author  of  Beltraffio,  The,  446 

Authorized  Version  of  the  Bible,  193 
Autumn,"  238 

Avalon,  31,  280 

4**.  434,  435 


Avery,  Captain,  275 
Avon,  The,  126 
"Awake  my  Lute,"  77 
Awkward  Age,  The,  445,  446 
Ayrshire,  267,  269 

BACON,  FRANCIS,  160-1^4,  178,  199, 
344;  his  life  and  character,  161;  hie 
system,  161-162;  his  essays,  162— 163; 
his  style,  164 

Baeda,  (see  Bede),  14-15 

"  Balaustion's  Adventure,"  365 

"Ballad  in  Blank  Verse,"  443 

"Ballad  of  Agincourt,"  100 

"Ballad  of  a  Nun,  The,"  442 

"Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,  The,"  434 

"  Ballade  of  Charitie,"  245 

Ballads  and  Songs,  442 

Balle,  John,  58 

Balmawhapple,  Laird,  397 

Balzac,  411 

Bankside,  116,  149 

Banquo,  139 

Barabbas,  in  Jew  of  Malta,  120 

Barchester  Towers,  411 

"Bard  Ethell,"  462 

Bard  of  the  Gael  and  Gall,  462 

"Bard,  The,"  243 

Bardell,  Widow,  in  Pickwick,  403 

Bardolph,  146 

Baron's  Wars,  99 

Barrack-Room  Ballads,  441,  450 

Barry  Lyndon,  407 

Bartholomew  Fair,  144 

Bastille,  353 

Bath,  393 

Battle  of  Brunanburh,  21 

Battle  of  Maldon,  21 

"Battle  of  the  Baltic,"  312 

Battle  of  the  Books,  216 

"Beata  Beatrix,"  379 

Beatrice,  133,  338 

Beauchamp,  Richard,  Earl  of  Warwick, 
68 

Beauchamp' s  Career,  420 

Beaufort,  Jane,  65 

Beaumont,  Francis,  147,  149-151 

BEAUMONT  AND  FLETCHER,  149-151 

BECKFORD,  WM.,  294 

BEDE  (THE  VENERABLE  BEDE),  14-15, 
19,  20,  30 

Bedfordshire,  194,  195 

Beggars'  Opera,  236 

BEHN,  MRS.,  291 

Belch,  Sir  Toby,  133 

Beige,  in  Faerie  Queene,  06 

Belphcebe,  95 

Bemerton,  167 

"Ben"  (see  Jonson),  143 

Bending  of  the  Bough,  The,  434,  435 

Benedick,  133 


INDEX 


503 


Bennet,  Arnold,  452,  453-454 

Bennet,  Lydia,  394 

Bennet,  Mary,  394 

Bennet,  Mr.,  394 

Bentley,  216,  234 

Beowulf,  g,  10.  u,  12,  384 

Beowulf,  the  poem,  8-12,  13,  16,  23 

Beowulf's  Mount,  12 

Berkeley,  216 

Beulah.  195 

Beverley,  256 

Bevis  of  Hampton,  31 

Bible,  The,  59,  76,  99,  193,  194,  371, 

377 

Bible  Stories,  104,  305 
Bickerstaff,  Isaac,  218,  219 
Biographic  Litcraria,  228 
"Black-eyed  Susan,"  236 
Blackfriars  Theatre,  116,  126 
Blackwood1 's  Magazine,  416 
BLAKE,   WILLIAM,   266-267,  3°8,  310, 

327,  404,  440 

Blank  verse,  78,  118,  190,  239,  240 
Bleak  House,  406 
Blenheim,  224 

"Blessed  Damosel,  The,"  378 
Blifil,  in  Tom  Jones,  282,  283 
Blot  in  the  Scutcheon,  The,  361 
"Blue  Closet,  The,"  382 
Blue  Coat  School,  209 
Boccaccio,  44,  45,  46,  48,  54,  64 
Boethius,  20 
Boleyn,  Anne,  77,  338 
Bolingbroke,   216,   217,   232,   234,   235, 

263 

Book  of  the  Duchesse,  The,  42,  54 
Booth,  Capt.,  in  Amelia,  283,  284 
Border  Minstrelsy,  310 
BOSWELL,  JAMZS,  251-252 
Bottom,  129 

Bower  of  Bliss,  in  Faerie  Queene,  97 
Bowling,  in  Roderick  Random,  286 
Boy  actors,    in   Elizabethan    theatres, 

Bradwardine,  Baron,  397 

Brama,  335 

Bramble,  Matt,  286 

Bramble,  Tabitha,  286 

Brantwood,  377 

Brasenose  College,  180 

Bravo  of  Venice,  The,  294 

Bread  Street,  181 

"Break,  break,  break,"  355 

Breck,  Alan,  427 

Bridges,  Robert,  438 

Bristol,  245 

"Bristowe  Tragedy,"  The,  245 

Britannia's  Pastorals,  171 

British  Constitution,  296 

Britomarte,  95 

Broad  Church  movement,  The,  415 


Brobdingnag,  220 

BRONTE,  CHARLOTTE,  413-414 

BRONTE,  EMILY,  413 

Brooke,  Lord,  100 

"Brougham  Castle,  Song  at  the  Feast 

of,"  302 
BROWNE,  SIR  THOMAS,   177-179,   207, 

BROWNE,  WILLIAM,  161,   170-171,  185 

BROWNING,  ELIZABETH  BARRETT,  361, 
366-367 

BROWNING,  ROBERT,  327,  368,  386,  421, 
432,  437,  458;  contrasted  with  Tenny- 
son, 359;  life  and  career,  360;  his 
marriage,  361;  his  interest  in  soul- 
history,  363-364;  his  dramatic  fac- 
ulty, 363;  his  method,  363-364;  his 
wide  sympathy,  364-365;  his  teach- 
ing, 365-366 

"Brushwood  Boy,  The,"  449 

Brussels,  414 

Brutus,  30 

Buckingham,  Duke  of,  211 

Bufo,  254 

BULWER  LYTTON,  EDWARD,  400-401, 
406,  407 

Bumble,  in  Oliver  Twist,  405 

Bunhill  Fields,  192 

BUNYAN,  JOHN,  173,  181,  193,  194-197, 
209,  274 

Burbage,  James,  116,  125 

Burbon,  in  Faerie  Queene,  96 

BURGER,  311,  312 

Buried  Alive,  454 

BURKE,  EDMUND,  259-263,  264;  views 
on  America  and  India,  260;  on 
French  Revolution,  260-261;  polit- 
ical thought,  261-262;  romanticism, 
262,  296,  303 

Burleigh,  Lord,  160 

Burley,  in  Old  Mortality,  398,  399 

BURNEY,  FANNY,  255,  291,  292 

Burns,  Gilbert,  269 

BURNS,  ROBERT,  267-270,  303,  308,  310, 
350,  358 

BURTON,  RICHARD,  179,  180,  207,  331 

Bury  St.  Edmunds,  64 

BUTLER,  SAMUEL,  208-209,  452-453 

Butter's  Weekly  Newes  from  Italy  and 
Germanie,  223 

Button's,  204 

BYRON,  GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD,  303, 
312,  313-316,  336,  351,  395;  his  per- 
sonality, 316;  travels  and  eastern 
tales,  313-314;  his  popularity,  314; 
his  satire,  316;  his  force,  316 

Byron,  Miss  Harriet,  in  Sir  Charles 
Grandison,  280,  281 

Byronic  type,  The,  294 

Byronism,  286,  400 

"By  the  Fireside,"  366 


504 


INDEX 


C/EDMON,  I5-I<5,  17,  ig 

Ccelum  Britannkum,  174 

Caesar,  4 

Ccesar  and  Cleopatra,  460 

Caesura,  63 

Cain,  314 

Calcutta,  406 

Caleb  WUliams,  296,  317 

"  Caliban  upon  Setebos,"  364 

Calidore,  Sir,  in  Faerie  Queene,  95 

Cambel,  95 

Camberwell,  360,  362 

Cambridge,  93,  118,  143,  167,  168,  172, 

182,  202,  209,  242,  287,  299,  301,  343, 

354,  406,  414 
Camelot,  32 
"Campaign,  The,"  224 
CAMPBELL,  THOMAS,  312,  321 
CAMPION,  THOMAS,  101 
Candida,  459 
Candlemas  Eve,  172 
Canon's  Yeomen,  in  Canterbury  Tales, 

Canterbury,  49,  64,  118 

Canterbury  Tales,  48,  54,  55;  plan,  48; 
pilgrims  at  the  Tabard,  49-51;  the 
characters,  49-51,  55,  382 

Canticles,  Rolle's,  35 

Canynge,  William,  245 

Captain  Singleton,  272 

Captains  Courageous,  449 

Capulet,  130 

Caracalla,  Baths  of,  318 

Carew,  173 

Caricature,  Dickens's,  403 

CARLYLE,  THOMAS,  368,  370,  371,  373, 
374.  377,  4J5;  life  and  writings,  349- 
350,357;  spirit  of  his  work,  351;  Sar- 
tor Resartus,  its  meaning,  352;  its 
style,  353;  his  art,  353;  his  service  to 
his  age,  354 

'Carlylese,"  353 

Carton,  Sidney,  406 

Casa  Guidi  Windows,  361,  367 

"Cashel  of  Munster,"  462 

"Castaway,  The."  265 

"Caste,"  458 

Castle  of  Indolence,  The,  239 

Castle  of  Otranto,  293,  295 

Castle  Rackrent,  392 

Castlewood,  410 

Castlewood,  Lady,  410 

Catiline,  144 

Catherine,  406 

Catherine  de  Medici,  98 

Catholicism,  167 

Catholic  Revival,  The,  415 

Catholics,  229 

Cato,  224 

Cavalier  poets,  173-174 

Cavahers,  The,  192,  225 


Caxton,  69,  72 

Caxtons,  The,  401 

"Cean  Duv  Deelish,"  462 

Cecilia,  291,  292 

Celestial  City,  106 

Celtic  influence,  17,  19,  29,  321 

Celts,  The,  5,  6,  7 

Cenci,  The,  318 

Censorship,  The,  186 

Cervantes,  289 

Cesar,  35 

Chance,  451 

Changeling,  The,  153 

CHAPMAN,  GEORGE,  98-09,  323 

Chapman's  Homer,  99,  323 

"Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade,  The," 
too,  356 

Charlemagne,  29,  31 

Charles  I,  149,  161,  168,  172,  173,  176, 
1 86,  193,  208 

Charles  II,  156,  157,  198,  199,  202, 
206,  208,  213 

Charles  the  Bald,  20,  399 

Charlotte,  Queen,  291 

Chartism,  350,  415 

CHATTERTON,  THOMAS,  245-246,  310 

CHAUCER,  GEOFFREY,  7,  27,  40,  41-55, 
76,  79,  170,  201,  204,  226,  232, 
322,  325,  382,  383;  his  life,  41;  at 
court,  41;  influenced  by  the  Roman 
de  la  Rose,  42;  on  the  Continent,  43; 
duties  as  controller,  43;  middle  life 
and  Italian  period,  44;  English  period 
and  Italian  influence,  46;  Legend  of 
Goode  Wommen,  46;  influenced  by  new 
national  life,  47;  Canterbury  Tales, 
48  et  seq.;  his  art,  54;  his  material, 
55 ;  contrasted  with  Gower,  55, 56;  with 
Langland,  59,  60,  63,  64;  influence, 
64,  65;  his  portrait,  65 

Cheapside,  172 

Chelsea,  350 

Chesterfield,  Lord,  228 

Cheyne  Row,  350 

Child  actors,  115,  116 

Cktide  Harold,  313,  314,  315 

"Childe  Roland,"  364 

Children  in  English  fiction,  404,  405 

Children  of  Paul's,  115 

Children  of  the  Chapel  Royal,  115 

Chivalry,  29,  31 

Choruses,  113,  192 

Choruses  in  Henry  V,  81,  113,  131  , 

Christ,  17,  35,  104,  105,  120,  122,  181 
'Christ  in  Hades,"  437 

"Christabel,"  299,  300 

Christian  Hero,  The,  227 

Christian  Year,  The,  347 

Christianity,  8,  14,  17,  178,  216,  219, 

"Christina,"  365 


INDEX 


Christmas,  no 

"Christinas  Eve,"  365 

Christmas  mummings,  no 

Christ's  Hospital,  209 

Christ's  Victory  and  Triumph  in  Earth 
and  in  Heaven,  170 

Church,  The,  of  England,  76,  159,  166, 
167,  203,  287,  354 

Church,  The,  of  Rome,  50,  58,  59,  70, 
7i,  72,  73,  i°3,  185,  203,  206,  346 

Citizen  of  the  World,  The,  253,  254 

Civil  War,  The,  143,  151,  168,  194 

Clarence,  Duchess  of,  41 

Clarendon,  Lord,  178 

Clarissa  Hailowe,  278,  279,  283 

Classical  traditions,  The,  246 

Classicism,  114,  144,  175,  200,  248,  249, 
368,  369,  sj7o 

Classics,  Tho,  71,  in,  112,  182 

Claude,  295 

Clayhanger,  453,  454 

Cleopatra,  140 

Clere,  78 

Clerk  of  Oxford,  The,  in  Canterbury 
Tales,  50,  51 

Clifford,  407 

Clive,  343 

Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  The,  412 

Closed  couplet,  The,  202 

Clothes-philosophy,  Carlyle's,  351 

Clowns,  109,  128,  133 

Cockermouth,  301 

Coffee  houses,  147,  204 

COLERIDGE,  SAMUEL  TAYLOR,  291-301, 
309,  310,  311,  312,  329,  332,  337, 
339,  342,  358,  388,  396;  "in  the  new 
poetry,"  298;  early  life,  299;  German 
influence,  299-300;  poetic  charac- 
teristics, 300-301 

Colet,  John,  72 

Colin  Clout's  Come  Home  Again,  92 

Collier,  Jeremy,  213,  215,  357 


COLLINS,     WILLIAM,     240-241,     303, 


Confessions  of  an  English  Opium-Eater^ 

334.  335 

Confessions  of  a  Young  Man,  434 
CONGREVE,  WILLIAM,  213 


Collins,  Mr.,  394 
327 


Colombe's  Birthday,  361 

Colonel  Jacqitt,  277 

Columbus,  71 

Comedy  of  Errors,  1 28 

"Come  live  with  me  and  be  my  Love," 
101 

Commonwealth,  187,  198 

''Complaint  of  the  Duke  of  Bucking- 
ham, The,"  79 

Complaints,  92 

Complete  Angler,  180 

Comus,  123,  184,  185,  190 

Conceits,  165,  167 

Conciliation  with  America,  260 

(.tnduct  of  the  Allies,  The,  216 

i*  cnfessio  Amcntis,  56 


Conquest  of  Granada,  211 
Consolations  of  Philosophy,  20 


CONRAD,  JOSEPH,  451- 


CONSTABLE,  HENRY,  IOI 

"Coquette's  Heart,  The,"  226 

Cordelia,  137,  138 

"Corinna  going  a-Maying,"  172,  173 

Coriolanus,  140 

Corneille,  200 

CornhM  Magazine,  The,  440 

Corpus  Christi,  105 

Corsair,  The,  313 

"Cotter's  Saturday  Night,"  268 

Country  Churchyard.    See  ELEGY 

Country  House,  The,  455 

Country  Wife,  The,  213 

Couplets,  54,  252 

Court,  41,  56,  73,  86,  87,  89,  116,  127, 

173,  203 

Covenanters,  399 
Covent  Garden  Theatre,  402 
Coventry,  124,  338 

COVERDALE,  MlLES,  76 

Coverley,  de,  225,  226 

COWLEY,  ABRAHAM,  168 

COWPER,  WILLIAM,  264-265,  308,  310 

CRABBE,  GEORGE,  264,  305,  308,  310 

Craigenputtoch,  350 

Cranford,  416 

Cranmer,  Archbishop,  76,  85 

CRASHAW,  RICHARD,  167-169,  440 

Crawley,  Rawdon,  408 

Crecy,  49 

Critic,  The,  225 

Criticism,  English,  88,   205,  207,  215, 

224,   248,    249,    250,   328,   329,   33<>r 

372 

Cromwell,  157,  176,  187,  202,  210,  350 
"Crossing  the  Bar,"  357 
"Cry  of  the  Children,  The,"  366 
Cuchullain  of  Muirthemne,  462,  466 
"Cuckoo  Song,"  39 
Culture,  371 

Culture  and  Anarchy,  370 
Cumberland,  301,  302,  303 
"Cupid's  Arrows,"  449 
Curse  of  Kehama,  The,  309 
Cursor  Mundi,  34 
Cymbeline,  140 
Cynewulf,  16,  17 
Cynthia,    Queen   Elizabeth,   in   Faerie 

Queene,  101;  in  Lyly's  Endymion,  115 
Cynthia's  Revels,  144 

Daisy  Miller,  445 
£>anes,  8,  9,  19,  20,  21,  22 
Daniel,  15 


INDEX 


Daniel  Deronda,  417,  419 
DANIEL,  SAMUEL,  100 
Dante,  44,  188,  195,  306,  322 
Dante  and  his  Circle,  379 
D'Arblay,  General,  291 
Dark  Lady,  The,  in  Shakespeare's  Son- 
nets, 134 
Dartmouth,  30 
Darwin,  356 
Dauber,  443 

DAVENANT,  SIR  WILLIAM,  210 
David,  175,  203,  222 
David  and  Bethsabe,  122,  123 
David  Balfour,  426 
David  Copperfield,  403 
David  Grieve,  447 
David  Simple,  291 
Davideis,  The,  175 

DAVIDSON,  JOHN,  441-443;  his  modern- 
ism, 442;   his  contrasts,  443 
DAVIES,  SIR  JOHN,  100 
Davis,  Thomas,  461 
Day's  Work,  The,  448,  449 
Deans,  Jeanie,  398 
Death,  in  miracle  plays,  108 
"Death  in  the  Desert,  A,"  365 
Death  of  Byrtnoth,  21 
Death  of  Cuchullain,  464 
De  Augmenlis  Scienli-arem,  162 
de  Burgh,  Lady  Catherine,  395 
Decadence,  430,  433 
Decameron,  48 
De  Claris  Mulieribus,  46 
Dedlock,  Lady,  406 
Defarge,  Mme.,  in  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities, 

404 
"  Defence   of   an   Essay   of   Dramatic 

Poetry,''  207 

Defence  of  Guenevere,  The,  381 
Defence  of  Poesie,  The,  88 
DEFOE,  DANIEL,  274-278,  292 
DEKKER,  THOMAS,  m,  151 
Deirdre,  464 

Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows,  467 
Deism,  235 
Delia,  loo 

Demas,  in  Pilgrim's  Progress,  195 
Demogorgon,  in  Prometheus  Unbound, 

319 

Denmark,  i,  12 
DENNIS,  JOHN,  234 
Denry  the  Audacious,  453 
Dear's  Lament,  4 
"Departed  Friends,"  169 
Departmental  Ditties,  450 
De  Profundis,  433,  434 
DE  QUINCEY,  THOMAS,  333-336;   Con- 
fesswns  of  an  Opium-Eater,  334-333; 
his  style,  335-336;    his  defects  as  a 
writer,  336 
Descent  of  Man,  The,  356 


"Descent  of  Odin,"  244 

"Description  of  a  Religious  House,"  168 

Desdemona,  137 

Deserted  Village,  The,  253,  254 

Desperate  Remedies,  422 

de  Vere,  Aubrey,  462 

Devereux,  Lady  Penelope,  87 

Devil,  The,  in  mystery  plays,  106 

Devil,  The,  tavern,  147 

Devil's  Disciple,  The,  469 

Devonshire,  172,  209 

Dhu,  Evan,  397 

Diana  (Constable),  100 

Diana  of  the  Crossways,  420,  448 

Diarmid  and  Crania,  434,  435 

DICKENS,  CHARLES,  367,  401-406,  407, 
412,  457;  his  use  of  criminal  types, 
404;  his  striking  success,  402;  his 
training,  402;  his  "humors,"  403; 
his  humanitarianism,  404-405;  his 
plots,  405-406 

Dictatorship,  Doctor  Johnson's,  252, 
2S3 

Dideyne  (Dido),  35 

Dido,  46 

Diomedes,  45 

"  Dirge  in  Cymbeline,"  241 

Discourses  in  America,  372 

DISRAELI,  BENJAMIN,  400 

Dissenters,  168,  274,  277,  371 

"Dissertation  on  Roast  Pig,"  331 

Divine  Comedy,  The,  195 

Divine  Vision,  The,  465 

Divorce,  Milton's  pamphlet  on,  186 

Dobbin,  in  Vanity  Fair,  407 

Dr.  Fauslus,  119,  120 

Doctor's  Dilemma,  The,  460 

Dombey,  Florence,  405 

Don  Carlos,  211 

Don  Juan,  314,  315,  316,  317 

DONNE,  JOHN,  164-166,  167,  168,  r.jo, 
173,  174,  175.  176,  177,  180,  183,  231 

Dorothea  [Brooke],  419 

Dorsetshire,  192 

"Dover  Beach,"  369 

Dragon  of  the  Gold-hoard,  in  Beowulf. 
ii 

Drake,  Sir  Francis,  86,  122 

Drama,  Elizabethan,  Lamb's  revival 
of,  330 

Drama,  Greek,  387 

Drama,  later  nineteenth-century,  458- 
459 

"Drama  of  rhetoric,  The,"  115 

Drama,  Restoration,  216—214.  2S7 

Drama,  The,  81,  82,  92,  102.  103,  154. 
200-201,  458-461;  origins,  104,  107- 
classic  and  romantic,  111-114;  rheto- 
ric in  Elizabethan  age,  115,  119;  ris* 
of,  under  Elizabeth,  114-115;  thea- 
tres, 116;  Marlowe,  117-121;  Peele 


INDEX 


507 


122-123;  Shakespeare,  iitetseq.;  at- 
tempted by  Browning,  361 

Dramas  and  Lyrics,  437 

Dramatic  Lyrics,  361 

Dramatic  Romances,  361 

israpier's  Letters,  The,  217 

DRAYTON,  MICHAEL,  99,  100 

"  Dream  Children,"  33 1 

"Dream-Fugue,"  335 

Dream  of  John  Ball,  The,  385 

"Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes," 
146 

Drury  Lane  Theatre,  227,  255 

Dryden,  John,  $57;  early  life,  207,  229, 
243,  287,  324;  satires,  249;  substance 
of  his  poetry,  206;  as  a  critic,  207; 
his  prose,  208 

Dublin,  217,  255,  317,  433 

Dublin,  University  of,  215,  252 

Duchess  ofMalfi,  The,  153-154 

Duessa,  96 

Dunciad,  235,  320 

Dutch,  i 

Dutch,  The,  302,  329 

DYER,  SIR  EDWARD,  102 

Dynasts,  444 

Earth  Breath,  The,  465 

Earthly  Paradise,  The,  382,  385 

Easter,  189 

"Easter  Day,"  365 

Ebb  Tide,  The,  426 

Ecclefechan,  349 

Ecclesiastical    History    of   the    English 

People,  14,  19,  20,  30 
Ecclesiastical  Polity,  91 
Eclogues,  87,  93 
Edgbaston,  348 
EDGEWORTH,  MARIA,  392-393 
Edinburgh,  252,  269,  310,  334 
Edinburgh  Review,  313,  343 
Edinburgh,  University  of,  349 
Edward  II,  99 
Edward  II,  121 
Edward  III,  41,  47,  58 
Edward  VI,  80 
Edward's  Massacre,  243 
Egoist,  The,  420 
Eighteenth  century,  The,  in  England, 

215,  261,  310,  405 
"Elegy  in  a  Country  Churchyard,"  242, 

243 

"Elegy  of  Mr.  Partridge,  An,"  218 
Elena  (in  the  Italian),  295 
Elgin  marbles,  324 
Elia,  Essays  of,  329,  330,  331 
Elizabeth,  Queen  of  England,   62,  63, 

So,  81,  86,  89,  92,  95,  97,  113,  115,  122, 

124,  127,  132,  150,  158,  160,  208,  399 
Elizabethan  age,  The,  165,  174,  181,  197, 

199,  205,  211,  321,  342,  360 


Elizabethan  dramatists,  114,  322 
Elizabethan  literature,  09,  100-101, 145, 

Elizabethan  playhouses,  49 

Elizabethan  poetry,  327 

Elizabethan  prose,  250 

Elizabethan  revival,  The,  332 

"Eloisa  to  Abelard,"  229 

Elstow,  193 

Ely,  21 

Emerson,  307,  353 

Emilie,  in  "  Knight's  Tale,"  65 

Emma,  395 

"Endymion"    (Keats),   201,   246,   294*. 

323,  325 

Endymion  (Lyly),  115 
England's  Helicon,  100 
English,  i 

English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers,  313 
English  literature,  i,  21,  note 
English  Mail  Coach,  The,  335 
English  Prayer  Book,  The,  76 
Eostre,  2 

"Epilogue  to  the  Satires,"  230 
Epistle  to  Arbuthnot,  230,  254 
"Epistle  to  Da  vie,"  268 
"Epithalamion,"  Spenser's,  93 
Erasmus,  62,  412 
Erewhon,  452 
Erse,  245 

Essay  on  Criticism,  206,  229,  231 
"Essay  on  Dramatic  Poetry,  An,"  207 
Essay  on  Man,  230,  235 
"Essay  on  Satire,"  207 
Essay  writing,  331 
Essays,  Bacon's,  163,  164 
Essays,  Dr.  Johnson's,  249,  250,  251 
Essays,  Macaulay's,  344 
Essays  in  Criticism,  371 
Essays  of  Elia,  330,  331 
Essex,  Earl  of,  81,  101 
Esther  Waters,  434 
ETHEREGE,  SIR  GEORGE,  213 
Eton,  in,  242,  281,  317 
Euphues  and  his  England,  84,  89,  115, 

127 

Euphues'  Golden  Legacy,  90 
Euphues,  or  the  Anatomy  of  Wit,  84 
Euphuism,  164 
Euphuistic  romances,  oo 
Evans,  Mary  Ann.    See  GEORGE  ELIOT 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  and  other  poems,  323, 

325,  326 

Evelina,  291,  292 
Evelyn,  201 
"Evelyn  Hope,"  365 
Evelyn  Innes,  434,  435 
Everlasting  Mercy,  The,  443 
Every  Man  in  his  Humour,  144,  145 
Evolution,  356 
Examiner,  The,  222 


508 


INDEX 


296 


Excursion,  The,  302 
»"  Exile  of  Erin,  The,"  312 
Exile  of  the  Sons  of  Usnech,  467 
"Exodus  from  Houndsditch,"  442 
"Expostulation  and  Reply,"  302 
Eyre,  Simon,  151 

Fables  (Dry den),  204,  207 

Fables  (Gay),  236 

Faerie  Queene,  The,  81,  g2,  93;  analysis, 

94,  06,  99,  101,  195 
Fagin,  in  Oliver  Twist,  404 
Fairfax,  Lord,  176 
Fair  Quarrel,  A,  152 
Faithful  Shepherdess,  The,  149 
Falkland,  in  Caleb  Williams, 
Fall  of  Princes,  The,  79 
Falstaff,  131,  132,  147 
Fanny's  First  Play,  460 
Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd.  422 
"'Farewell  to  the  Famous  and  Fortunate 

Generals  of  ourt  English  Forces,  A," 

122 

FARQVHAR,  GEORGE,  214 

*'  Fatal  Sisters,  The,"  244 

Faust,  352 

Faustus,  120 

Feast  of  Pikes,  The,  353 

Ferdinand,  Count  Fathom,  285 

Ferguson,  Sir  Samuel,  461,  462 

Fermor,  Miss,  in  Rape  of  the  Lock,  233 

Ferraboscp,  144 

Ferrar,  Nicholas,  167,  168 

Feste,  in  Twelfth  Night,  133 

FIELDING,  HENRY,  255,  291,  410;   life, 

281;    works,  282-283;  qualities  as  a 

novelist,  284 

Fielding,  Sarah,  291  ' 

Fiesole,  44,  48,  337 
Fingal,  244 
Finsbury  Fields,  116 
First  and  Last  Things,  456 
First  Folio,  The,  of  Shakespeare,  142 
Foe  Nations,  The,  450 
Five  Towns,  The,  453,  454 
"Flaming  Heart,  The,"  168 
Flanders,  143 
"Flee  fro  the  Press,"  54 
Fleet  Street  Eclogues,  442 
FLETCHER,  GILES,  170 
FLETCHER,  JOHN,  122, 149-150,  183, 185 
Florence,  44,  48,  337,  338,  361 
Floris  and  Blancheflour,  31 
Florizel,  in  Winter's  Tale.  140 
Flourdelis,  96 
FORD,  JOHN,  154,  211 
Forest  Lovers,  The,  448 
Forest  of  Arden,  The,  90 
"Forget  not  yet,"  77 
Fors  Clavigera,  376 
"For  to  Admire  and  for  to  See,"  451 


Fortunes  of  Nigel,  The,  395 

Forty  Tales  from  the  HiUs,  448 

Four  P's,  The,  no 

"FraLippo  Lippi,"  365 

Framley  Parsonage,  41 1 

France,  5,  41,  47,  49,  68,  77,  88,  95,  i,"o, 

200,  201,  260,  297,  307,  317,  374 
"Francesca  da  Rimini,"  322 
Fraternity,  455,  456 
Frea,  2 

Frederick,  Prince,  141 
FreeJands,  The,  455 
Freeport,  Sir  Andrew,  235 
French,  The,  23,  131 
French  form,  394 

French  (language),  24,  25,  26,  38,  65 
French  philosophers,  317 
French  Poets  and  Novelists,  445 
"  French  Revolution,"  reflections  on  the, 

260 
French  Revolution,  The,  260-261,  »97, 

298,  299,  300,  312,  315,  319,  350,  353. 

405 

Fressingfield,  122 

Friar  Bacon  and  Friar  Bungay,  122 
Friday,  2 
Froissart,  41 
Fulham,  149 
Fuller,  144 
Further  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe, 

277 

Gaelic,  244 

Gaelic  League,  The,  463 

Galileo,  186 

Galsworthy,   John,   452,   454-456;    his 

social  criticism,  455;  his  realism,  456; 

his  pessimism,  456 
Gammer  Gurton's  Needle,  in 
Gamp,  Sairy,  in  Martin  Chuzilevnt,  403 
"Garden,  The,"  Marvell's,  176 
GASKELL,  MRS.  ELIZABETH,  415 
"Gather  ye  Rosebuds  while  ye  May,'r 

173 

Gaul,  s,  6 

Gaul,  in  Fingal,  244 
Gautland,  9 
Gawayne,  27;   see  5»>  Gawoyne  and  Ou- 

Green  Knight,  32 
GAY,  JOHN,  230,  234,  235 
Gebir,  336,  337 
Gellatley,  David,  397 
Geneva,  377 
"Genevieve,"  299 
Geoffrey  of  Monmouth,  20,  137 
George  II,  285 
George  III,  259 
George  IV,  344 
GEORGE  ELIOT,  367,  447;  her  life,  4:*: 

as  a  realist,  417 
"Germ,  The,"  378 


INDEX 


509 


German  Ocean,  2 

German  philosophy,  312 

German  reformers,  75 

Germanic  tribes,  6 

Germany,  71,  233,  297,  209,  302,  312 

Gelling  Married,  460 

Giant  Despair,  196 

Giaour,  The,  313 

GIBBON,  EDWARD,  257-259 

Gifford,  Mr.,  194 

"Gilliflower  of  Gold,  The,"  382 

Giorgione,  325 

"Give  me  more  love  or  more  disdain," 
173 

Gladstone,  343 

Gleeman,  The  (gle6man),  3,  5,  9,  25 

Gleggs,  The,  41 7 

Globe,  The  (theatre),  116,  125,  126 

Gloriana,  in  Faerie  Queene,  95 

Godiva,  338 

Gods  and  Fighting  Men,  466 

Godwin,  Mary,  318 

Godwin,  William,  295,  296,  317 

Goethe,  352 

Golden  Bou'l,  The,  445 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  252-255;  his  char- 
acter, 253;  his  plays,  246,  254-255, 
289,  290,  291 

Goneril,  in  King  Lear,  138 

Good  Friday,  444 

Good-Natured  Man,  The,  253 

Gorboduc,  or  Ferrex  and  Porrex,  79,  113, 
118,  144 

Gorhambury,  161 

GOSSON,  STEPHEN,  88 

"Gothic,"  293,  311 

Gothic  romance,  294,  295 

Governail  of  Princes,  65 

GOWER,  JOHN,  42,  56-58,  65 

Grace  Abounding  to  the  Chief  of  Sinners, 
173,  i94,.2io,  274 

"Grammarian's  Funeral,  The,"  364 

Grantorto,  in  Faerie  Queene,  96 

Grasmere,  302,  334 

GRAY,  THOMAS,  240,  242-244,  263,  294 

Gray's  Inn,  152 

Great  Duke  of  Florence,  The,  156 

Greece,  232,  313,  314,  369,  383 

Greek,  71,  72,  175,  182,  193,  337,  339 

Greek  dramatists,  322 

Greek  tragedy,  130 

GREENE,  ROBERT,  89,  90,  117,  122 

Greene's  Repentance,  90 

Green  Helmet,  The,  464 

Gregory,  20 

Grendel,  8,  9,  10,  n,  12 

Grey  de  Wilton,  Lord,  92,  94,  96 

Griffin,  Gerald,  461 

Grimbald  (King  Alfred's  mass-priest), 
20 

Grindal,  Archbishop,  94 


Gringolet,  32 

Grocyn,  William,  72 

Grub  Street,  247,  253 

Guinevere,  33,  359 

Gulliver's  Travels,  217,  218,  219-221 

Guy  Mannering,  395,  398 

Guy  of  Warwick,  31 

Guyon,  Sir,  in  Faerie  Queene,  95 

Gwendolen,  in  Daniel  Deronda,  419 

Hail  and  Fareu-ell,  434,  435 

HALES,  THOMAS  DE,  35 

Half  Way  House,  448 

Hallam,  Arthur,  356 

"Hamadryad,"  337 

Hamlet,  131,  134,  135,  136,  201 

Hampole,  Hermit  of,  34-35 

Hampshire  Grenadiers,  257 

Hampton,  223 

Hampton  Court  Palace,  73 

Hannibal,  338 

Happy  Prince,  The,  433 

Hardcastle,  Mr.,  255 

HARDY,  THOMAS,  no,  422-425,  434 

Harold,  357 

Harris,  Mrs.,  in  Martin  Chuzzlewit,  404 

Harrow,  284 

HARyEY,  GABRIEL,  93 

Hastings,  23,  25 

Hastings,  Warren,  260,  343 

Hathaway,  Ann,  125 

Hawkshead,  301,  307 

"Haystack  in  the  Floods,  The,"  382 

HAZLITT,  WILLIAM,  332-333,  44 1 

Heap,  Uriah,  404 

Heartfree   family,  in  Jonathan   Wilde, 

283 

Heart  of  Darkness,  The,  452 
Heart  of  Midlothian,  The,  395,  397,  398 
Hebraic  element,  The,  371,  374 
Hebrew,  193 
Hebrides,  189 
Hdbeck  of  Bannisdale,  447 
Helen  of  the  High  Hand,  453 
Hell-Mouth,  106 

HENLEY,  WILLIAM  ERNEST,  440-441 
Henry  IV,  of  France,  96,  200 
Henry  V,  65 
Henry  VI,  245 
Henry  VII,  70,  72,  73 
Henry  VIII,  72,  73,  75,  ?6,  78,  80,  338 
Henry  IV,  130,  131,  146 
Henry  V,  81,  114,  130,  iji,  146 
Henry  VI,  127,  128 
Henry  VIII,  141 
Henry  Esmond,  409,  411 
Heorot.  8,  9,  10,  n 
Heorrenda,  4 

HERBERT,  GEORGE,  166-167,  347,  439 
Hero  and  Leander,  98,  99 
Herod,  437 


510 


INDEX 


Herodias,  433 

Heroes  and  H era-Worship,  35°.  35 1 

Heroic  couplet,  The,  201,  202,  206,  232, 

238 

HERRICK,  ROBERT,  30,  172-173 
Hesperides  and  Noble  Numbers,  173 
HEWLETT,  MAURICE,  448 
Hexameters,  99 
HEYWOOD,  JOHN,  no 
HEYWOOD,  THOMAS,  151-152 
"Hidden   Flower,    The,"    Vaughan's 

poem,  169 

"Highland  Reaper,  The,"  304 
Highlands,  396 

Hilary  Dallison,  in  Fraternity,  455 
Hild,  Abbess  of  Whitby,  15 
Hilda  Lessways,  454 
Hind  and  the  Panther,  The,  203 

Hippolyta,  129 
Historia  Bretonum,  29 

Historical  novels,  401,  412 

History  of  England,  Macaulay,  343,  344 

History  of  Friedrich  II,  350 

History  of  the  Rebellion,  Clarendon's,  177 

History  of  the  World,  The,  Raleigh's,  101 

HOCCLEVE.    See  OCCLEVE 

Hogarth,  225 

"Hohenlinden,"  312 

Holbein,  Hans,  73 

Holland,  96,  196 

Holy  Grail,  The,  91,  359 

Holyhead,  32 

Holy  Living  and  Holy  Dying,  181 

"Holy  Willie,"  268 

Homer,  232,  234 

Homer,  Chapman's,  99 

Homer,  Pope's,  233,  234 

Homeward,  465 

Homilies,  21 

Honeycomb,  Will,  225 

HOOKER,  RICHARD,  91-92 

Horace,  204,  230,  232 

Horton,  182,  183,  185 

"Hound  of  Heaven,  The,"  439 

Hours  of  Idleness,  313 

House  of  Fame,  The,  44,  45,  47 

House  of  Life,  The,  367,  380 

•House  of  the  Wolfings,  The,  384 

Houyhnhnms,  220,  221 

Howard,  Henry.    See  SURREY 

Howard,  Lady  Elizabeth,  202 

Hrolf  the  Ganger  (Walker),  23 
Hrothgar,  in  Beowulf,  8,  9,  10 
Hudibras,  208 
Humanism,  71,  98 
"Humour,"  145-146 
Humphrey  Clinker,  285,  286 
HUNT,  LEIGH,  322,  323 
Hyde  Douglas,  463,  465,  466 
Hyde  Park,  156 
Hygelac,  9 


"Hymn  of  Heavenly  Beauty,"  93 
"Hymn  of  Heavenly  Love,"  93 
"Hymn  on  the  Nativity,"  182 
"  Hymns  in  Honor  of  Love  and  Beauty, 

"Hymn  to  St.  Theresa,"  168 
Hypatia,  415 
"Hyperion,"  324,-326 

lago,  136,  137 

Ibsen,  458-459 

Idea,  too 

Idea  of  a  University,  The,  348 

"Idiot  Boy,  The,"  309 

Idler,  The,  248 

Idylls  of  the  King,  357,  359 

Iliad,  Chapman's,  98,  09 

Iliad,  Pope's,  229 

"II  Penseroso,"  183,  240,  243 

Imaginary  Conversations,  337,  338,  339 

"  Imitations  of  Horace,"  234 

Imogen,  140 

"Imperfect  Sympathies,"  331 

Importance  of  Being  Earnest,  The,  433 

Impressionism,  431,  432 

Impressions  and  Opinions,  435 

Indian  Emperor,  The,  211 

Indian  Queen,  The,  211 

Individualism,  109,  200,  234/359,  404 

"Induction,  The,"  79 

Inductive  method,  161,  162 

Inferno  (Leigh  Hunt),  322 

In  Memoriam,  320,  355,  356 

Inner  Temple,  The,  113 

Instauratio  Magna,  161 

"Institutes  of  a  Christian  Prince,"  72 

Intentions,  433 

Interludes,  109-110 

Invictus,  441 

Invisible  God,  The,  458 

Ireland,   14,  20,  92,  93,  94,  215,  216, 
217,  219,  317,  392 

Irene,  247,  248,  249 

Irish  famine  of  1846-1847,  461 

Irish   Literary    Movement,    The,    435. 
461-467;  first  movement  for  an  Irish 
culture    in    English,    461-462;     the 
bringing  of  Celtic  material  into  An- 
glo-Irish  literature,   462;   the  Gaelic 
league,  463;  Mr.  Yeats's  poetry,  463- 
464;   significance  of  his  achievement, 
464-465;    George   W.    Russell,   465: 
Doctor  Douglas  Hyde,  465-466;    J. 
M.  Synge,  460-467 
Irish  Melodies,  321 
"Irish  Revival,"  463 
Isabella,  323 
Isle  of  Wight,  356 
Israel,  175,  365 
Italian  liberation,  367 
Italian  painters,  378 


INDEX 


Italian  poetry,  327 

Italian  poets,  322 

Italian  style,  23Q 

Italian  verse  forms,  87 

Italian,  The,  294 

Italy,  43,  44,  71,  72,  74,  76,  77,  ?8,  84, 
86,  87,  88,  166,  168,  178,  186,  201,  223, 
314,  318,  324,  337,  347,  360,  361,  362, 
367 

"It  is  a  beauteous  evening,"  302 

Ivanhoe,  305 

Jack  Wilton,  91 

Jacobean  dramatists.  See  RESTORA- 
TION, 2IO,  211,  212 

Jacobites,  399 

Jacques,  133 

James  I,  of  England,  139,  141,  144,  155, 
161,  193 

Tames  I,  of  Scotland,  65-66 

James  II,  of  England,  209,  344 

James  IV  (Greene),  122 

JAMES,  HENRY,  444-446;  his  art,  445; 
his  shorter  stories,  446 

Jane  Eyre,  413 

Janet,  in  Waverley,  397 

Jarrow,  14,  19 

Jarvie,  Baillie,  397 

Jenkins,  Win,  in  Humphrey  Clinker,  286 

Jenkinson,  in  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  200 

Jesus,  191 

Jew  of  Malta,  The,  120,  153 

Jews,  the,  52 

Joan  of  Arc,  336 

John,  King  Alfred's  i/iass-priest,  20 

John  Bull's  Other  Island,  460 

"John  Gilpin,"  265 

John  of  Gaunt,  43 

John  the  Baptist,  433 

Johnson,  Esther,  216,  217 

JOHNSON,  SAMUEL,  175,  204,  226,  257, 
258,  291,  349,  350;  his  life,  246; 
works,  247;  his  classicism,  248;  his 
reaction  against  classicism,  249;  his 
personality  and  character,  251-252 

"Jolly  Beggars,  The,"  270 

Jonathan  Wilde,  282,  283 

Jones,  Arthur  Henry,  459 

Jones,  Inigo,  144 

JONSON,  BEN,  114,  124,  126,  158,  159, 
164,  173,  201,  212;  his  opinion,  of 
Shakespeare,  142;  his  life,  142;  his 
classicism,  144;  his  "humours,"  145; 
his  realism,  145;  his  lyric  gift,  146; 
dictatorship,  147;  his  influence,  148 

Joseph  Andrews,  281 

Journal  of  the  Plague  Year,  275 

Journal  to  Stella,  216 

Journalism,  431,  432 

J  ude  the  Obscure,  423 

Juliet,  129,  133,  134,  141 


Julius  Casar,  132 
Jungle  Books,  The,  449 
Justice,  455 
Justice-bench,  25 
Jutes,  The,  i,  6,  7,  19 
Jutland,  i 
Juvenal,  204,  248 

KANT,  EMANUEL,  297,  299 

KEATS,  JOHN,  201,  230,  241,  318,  320, 
322,  339,  342;  his  inspiration,  322; 
life  and  poetic  development,  323;  his 
worship  of  beauty,  324;  qualities  of 
his  poetry,  325;  his  sense  of  form, 
325;  his  humanity,  326;  his  influence, 
327 

KEBLE,  JOHN,  347,  368 

Kenilworth,  395,  399 

Kenilworth  Castle,  124 

Kent,  43,  56 

Kew  Lane,  240 

Kidnapped,  426,  427 

Kilcolman,  manor  of,  92 

Kilmarnoch,  269 

Kim,  449 

King  Edward,  185 

King  James  Bible,  The,  193-194 

King  Lear,  131,  132,  137-138 

King's  Quair,  65,  66 

King's  Threshold,  The,  464 

"King's  Tragedy,  The,"  380 

"King's  Treasuries,"  376 

KINGSLEY,  CHARLES,  348,  367,  414,  415, 
447 

KlPLfNG,    RUDYARD,    441,   448-451;     his 

art  of  the  short  story,  449;  his  longer 
stories,  449;  his  poetry,  450;  his  hu- 
manity, 450—451 

Kipps,  457 

Knight's  Tale,  54,  65 

Knight,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  49, 

"Kubla  Khan,"  299,  301 
KYD,  THOMAS,  153 

Lathryma  Musarum,  437 
"Lady  Geraldine's  Courtship,"  366 
Lady  Gregory,  466 
Lady  Meed,  in  Piers  the  Plowman,  61 
"Lady  of  Shalott,  The,"  354 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  The,  311 
Lady  Rose's  Daughter,  447 
Lady  Windermere's  Fan,  433 
Lake,  The,  434,  435 
Lake  country,  The,  301,  377 
Lake  poets,  309,  334 
"Laleham  Churchyard,"  437 
LallaRookh,  321 
"L' Allegro,"  183,  190,  240 
LAMB,  CHARLES,  his  life,  329;  his  criti- 
cism, 330-331;  his  style,  331,  339 


512 


INDEX 


Lamia,  323,  325,  326 
Lancelot,  359  .  .    ,.,         , 

LANDOR,  WALTER  SAVAGE,  his  hfe  and 
genius,  336-33?;  Imaginary  Conver- 
sations, 338;  Pericles  and  Aspasia, 
339 

Land  War,  462,  463 
LAN  GLAND,  WILLIAM,  60,  432 
Languish,  Lydia,  256 
Lara,  314 
Laracor,  216 

L*si  Chronicle  of  Bar  set.  The,  411 
Last  Days  of  Pompeii,  The,  401 
Last  of  the  Barons,  The,  401 
Last  Poems  (Mrs.  Browning),  367 
"Last  Ride  Together,  The,"  365 
Latimer,  Bishop  Hugh,  75 
Latin,  56,  74,  88,  93,  "°,  128,  194,  200 
Latin  drama,  112 
Latin-English,  46 
Latin  models,  in 
Latin  Vulgate,  161,  162,  164,  178 
Latter-Day  Pamphlets,  350 
Launce,  in  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona, 

128 

Laura,  77 
Law-courts,  152 
Lawes,  Henry,  184 
Layamon,  29 
Layamon's  Brut,  30  et  seq. 
Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  The,  311 
•  Lays,  8 

Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  343 
"Lead,  Kindly  Light,"  347 
Lear,  137-138,  153 
"Leech-Gatherer,  The,"  202,  204 
Legend  of  Goode  Wommen,  The,  44,  46, 

47,  55 

Leghorn,  318 

Leicester,  Earl  of,  86,  92,  94,  96,  124 
"Lenore,"  Burger's,  311 
"Lent  is  come  with  love  to  town,"  39 
Leo  XIII,  Pope,  348 
Leofric,  338 
Leovenath,  30 
Le  Sage,  405 

Lesson  of  the  Master,  The,  446 
Letters,  Gray's,  242 
"Letters  on  a  Regicide  Peace,"  261 
"Letters  to  a  Young  Lady,"  226 
"Levana  and  Our  Ladies  of  Sorrow," 

335 

LEVER,  CHARLES,  450 
Lewes,  G.  H.,  416 
LEWIS,  MATTHEW  GREGORY,  294 
Leyden,  281 
"Lie,  The,"  101 

Life  and  Death  of  Jason,  The,  382 
Life  and  Habit,  452-453 
Life  of  John  Sterling,  350 
Life  of  Johnson,  251-252,  253 


Life  of  Nelson,  310 

Life  of  Schiller,  349 

Life's  Handicap,  448 

"Like  to  the  clear  in  highest  sphere," 

Lilliput,  210-220,  408 
Linacre,  Thomas,  74 
Lincolnshire,  354 
"  Lines  in  Early  Spring,"  302 
"Litany,  The,"  173 
Literary  Club,  The,  204,  252 
Literature  and  Democracy,  429,  430 
Literature  and  Dogma,  371,  447 
Little  Dorrit,  405 
Little  Giddings,  168 
Little  Nell,  in  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  405 
Little  Novels  of  Italy,  448 
Littlemore,  347 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  249 
"Lochiel,"  312 
LODGE,  THOMAS,  90,  101 
Lollard  movement,  59 
Lollards,  The,  52 

London,  58,  72,  92,  93,  94,  "4,  "5,  "7, 
130,  145,  151,  173,  180,  181,  192,  198, 

202,  204,  212,  2 1 6,  230,  238,  240,  246, 

252, 255, 259, 264,  278, 281, 299, 331, 

350,  355,  36o,  380,  393,  403,  4io 
"London"  (Dr.  Johnson),  248 
London  Bridge,  49 

London  Fire,  202  , 

London  Magazine,  330 
"London  Voluntaries,"  441 
Lord  Admiral's  Men,  118 
Lord  Chamberlain's  Men,  118 
Lord  Jim,  451 
Lords,  House  of,  260 
Loretto,  Our  Lady  of,  168 
"Lotus-Eaters,  The,"  354 
Louis  XI,  309 
Louis  XIV,  216 
L'Ouverture,  Toussaint,  302 
Love  for  Love,  213 

"Love  in  my  bosom  like  a  bee,"  90 
Lovelace  in  Clarissa  Harlowe,  278-279 
LOVELACE,  RICHARD,  173,  174 
Love  poetry,  18,  46,  77,  100 
"Lover's  Message,  The,"  17 
"Love  Rune"  of  Thomas  de  Hales,  35 
Love's  Labour's  Lost,  127 
"Love  Songs  of  Connacht,  The,"  466 
Lowell,  J.  R.,  149 
Lowland  dialect,  268 
Lowlands,  349 
Lucas,  Sir  William,  394 
Lucifer,  188 
Lucrece,  126 
Lucretia  (Bulwer),  401 
Lucy,  Sir  Thomas,  125 
Ludlow  Castle,  184 
Lumpkin,  Tony,  254 


INDEX.  513, 


Luther,  59,  71 

Luxury  of  a  Vain  Imagination,  The,  249 

Lycidas,  185,  186,  189,  320 

Lydgate,  in  Middlemarch,  419 

LYDGATE,  JOHN,  65,  79 

LYLY,  GEORGE,  84-85,  89,  90,  115-116, 

117,  127,  207 
Lyme,  393 

Lyrical  Ballads,  298,  301,  306,  311,  337 
Lyric  poetry,   English,   4,    17,  oo,  172, 

174,  206,  236,  241,  291,  321,  355,  381 
Lyrics,  Elizabethan,  100,  101,  102,  113, 

116 

MACAULAY,  T.  B.,  292;  life,  343;  his 
essays,  their  style,  344;  History  of 
England,  344;  his  unideal  view  of 
Hie,  345 

Macbeth,  131,  134,  138-139,  146 

Macbeth,  Lady,  139 

MacFlecknoe,  235,  303 

MACKENZIE,  HENRY,  289 

Macwheeble,  Baillie,  397 

Madame  Eglantine,  in  Canterbury  Tales, 
5° 

Madeline,  in  Si.  Agnes'  Eve,  325 

Madonna  of  the  Future,  The,  446 

Magdalen  College,  Cambridge,  209 

Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  84 

Maid  of  Honour,  The,  156 

Maid's  Tragedy,  The,  149-150 

Malaprop,  Mrs.,  256 

Malory,  Sir  Thomas,  68,  69 

"Maltese  Cat,  The,"  449 

Malvolio,  133 

Man  and  Superman,  460 

Manchester,  334,  415 

Manfred,  314 

Mangan,  461,  462 

Manley,  Mrs.,  291 

Man  of  Destiny,  The,  459 

Man  of  Feeling,  The,  289 

Man  of  Property,  The,  455,  456 

Mansfield  Park,  395 

Many  Inventions,  448 

Marat,  353 

Marathon,  81 

Marcella,  447 

Marcellus,  338 

Margaret,  in  Friar  Bacon  and  Friar 
Bungay,  122 

Margaret,  in  The  Prelude,  305 

Margery,  in  The  Shoemakers'  Holiday, 

Maria,  in  The  Sentimental  Journey,  228 
Maria,  in  Twelfth  Night,  133 
Mark  of  the  Beast,  The,  449 
Marlborough,  Duke  of,  224,  410 
MARLOWE,  CHRISTOPHER,  89,  98,  101, 
117-121,   122,   123;    his  programme, 
99,  118;   his  plays,  114;   influence  in 


Shakespeare,  110-121,  127,  133,  150, 

i83,.ioo 
Marmton,  311 
"Marpessa,"  437 
Marriage,  457 

Marriage  of  William  Ashe,  The,  447 
Marshalsea  Prison,  402 
Martin  Chuzzlewit,  403 
Martyn,  Edward,  466 
MARVELL,  ANDREW,  175-176,  187 
Mary,  36 
Mary  Barton,  416 
Mary,  Queen,  80,  82 
Mary  Queen  zl  Scots,  96,  448 
Marys,  The  three,  104 
MASEFIELD,  JOHN,  434,  443~444 
Masques,  129,  144,  174,  183,  184 
Massinger,  Philip,  155-156 
Master  of  Ballantrae,  The,  426 


May-day,  46 
"May 

up,  9 


, 
Queen,  The,"  354 


ay 

Mead-c 

Mead-drinking,  in  Beowulf,  8,  9 
Mead-hall,  8,  n 
Measure  for  Measure,  134,  135 
Medal,  The,  203 
Mediaeval  romances,  383 
Melibeus,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  53 
Memoirs,  Gibbon's,  257-259 
Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life,  434,  435 
Menaxhmi,  128 

Mephistopheles,  in  Doctor  Faustus,  120 
Merchant  of  Venice,  The,  132 
Merchant,   The,   hi   Canterbury    Tales, 

51 

Mercutio,  130 
MEREDITH,  GEORGE,  226,  420-422,  423, 

445,  446,  448 

"Merlin  and  the  Gleam,"  357 
Mermaid,  The,  tavern,  147,  149,  204 
Merrilies,  Meg,  398 
Merry  Wives  of  Windsor,  132 
Metre,  54,  55,  63,  76,  88,  94,  99,  254 
Metrical  romances,  28  et  seq. 
Meyricks,  The,  in  Daniel  Deronda,  417 
Micawber,  in  David  Copperfield,  403 
"Michael,"  302,  305 
Middle  Ages,  The,  28,  44,  45,  48,  55,  56, 

70,  103,  107,  108,  168,  241,  244,  272, 

311,  346,  378 

Middle  class,  278,  286,  411 
Middlemarch,  417,  419 
MIDDLETON,  THOMAS,  152-153,  212 
Midsummer  Night's  Dream,    128,    129, 


'Migration,"  The, 


Milestones,  454 

MILL,  JOHN  STUART,  416 

Mill  on  the  Floss,  The,  417,  418 

Miller,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  52 

"Miller's  Daughter,  The,"  354 


INDEX 


MILTON,  JOHN,  98,  159,  17°,  176,  179. 
181-193,  205,  207,  225,  240,  241,  243, 
257,  302,  305,  320,  322,  323,  324,  339, 
358,  387;  We,  181-182;  the  Horton 
period,  182-185;  Comus,  184;  his  seri- 
ousness, 184-185;  public  life,  186-187; 
prose  writings,  186-187;  Paradise 
Lost,  187-188;  his  "sublimity,"  180- 
190;  his  style,  190-191;  Samson 
Agonistes,  191-192;  last  years,  192 

Milton,  Macaulay's  essay  on,  343 

Minsters,  24 

Minvane,  in  Fingal,  244,  245 

Mirabeau,  353 

Miracle  plays,  108,  no,  112 

Mirror  for  Magistrates,  The,  79 

Missolonghi,  314 

Mistress,  The  (Cowley),  175 

Mistress  of  Philarete,  171 

Modern  Lover,  A,  434 

Modern  Painters,  374,  375 

Modern  Painting,  435 

Modern  Utopia,  A,  456,  458 

Modest  Proposal,  219 

Mohun,  in  Henry  Esmond,  410 

Moliere,  200,  212,  213 

Moll  Flanders,  277 

Monimia,  in  The  Orphan,  211 

Monk,  The,  294 

Monk,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  49, 
So,  52 

Monks,  19,  20,  21,  24,  35 

Monmouth,  Duke  of,  203 

Montpellier,  178 

MOORE,  GEORGE,  434-436,  466 

MOORE,  THOMAS,  321-322 

"Moral  Epistles,"  230,  234 

Morality  plays,  108,  109 

MORE,  SIR  THOMAS,  73,  74,  75,  205 

Morgain,  33 

Morris,  Dinah,  in  Adam  Bede,  417 

MORRIS,  WILLIAM,  his  medievalism, 
381-382;  The  Earthly  Paradise,  382; 
his  socialism,  384-385 

Morte  Darthttr,  31,  68,  69,  355 

Mortimer,  100 

Morton,  in  Old  Mortality,  398,  309 

Mossgiel,  269 

"Mountain  Daisy,  The,"  310 

"Mower  to  the  Glow-worms,  The,"  176 

Mr.  Bribing  Sees  It  Through,  457 

Mr.  Petty,  457 

Mr.  Stone,  in  Fraternity,  456 

Mrs.  Pendyce,  in  The  Country  Htuse, 

Mrs.  Warren's  Profession,  459 
Much  Ado  About  Nothing,  133 
Munera  Pulveris,  375 
Musophilus,  TOO 
"My  Last  Duchess,"  364 
My  Lord  the  Elephant,"  449 


"My  mind  to  me  a  Kingdom  is,"  102 

My  Novel,  401 

"My  Sister's  Sleep,"  379 

"My  Star,"  365 

Mysteries,  105 

Mysteries  of  Udolpho,  294 

Mysticism,  35,  178,  299,  305,  344 

"Nabob  of  Arcot's  Debts,  The,"  260 

Namancos,  189 

Napoleon,  297,  315,  409 

Napoleonic  War,  312,  321,  400 

NASH,  THOMAS,  90-91 

Nation,  The,  461,  462 

National  Observer,  The,  441 

Nature,  in  English  literature,  16, 17, 169, 
175,  231,  238,  239,  240,  269,  292,  293, 
298,  302,  303,  304,  305,  306,  307,  321, 
329,  4.14 

"Necessity  of  Atheism,"  317 

Nether  Stowey,  299 

"Never  the  Time  and  the  Place,"  361 

New  Ballads,  442 

Newbold,  Revell,  68 

Newcome,  Colonel,  411 

Newcomes,  The,  411 

New  Machiavelli,  The,  457 

NEWMAN,  JOHN  HENRY,  346-349;  his 
religious  history,  347-348;  his  prose 
style,  348-349,  368,  372,  373 

News  from  Nowhere,  385 

New  Way  to  Pay  Old  Debts,  156 

New  Worlds  for  Old,  456 

Nicholas  Nickleby,  405 

Nicholas  of  Hereford,  59 

"Nightingales,"  438 

"Night  of  Spurs,  The,"  353 

"Night  Piece  to  Julia,"  173 

Night  Thoughts,  342 

Nineteenth  century,  297  et  seq. 

Noah,  in  miracle  plays,  106,  107 

Norman  Conquest,  The,  24  et  seq.,  39, 
40 

Normandy,  23 

Norman-French,  382 

Norman-French  period,  The,  7,  23  et 
seq.,  31,  60,  68 

Norna  of  the  Fitful  Head,  398 

Norris,  122 

North  and  South,  416 

Northanger  Abbey,  393 

Northumbria,  14,  19,  22 

NORTON,  THOMAS,  79,  113,  118 

Nosce  Teipsum,  100 

NOVEL,  THE,  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
255;  relations  to  drama  in  eighteenth 
century,  271;  mediaeval  sources,  272; 
during  the  English  Renaissance,  273; 
during  the  seventeenth  century,  273- 
274;  its  real  beginnings  with  Defoe, 
274-275;  its  moralization,  277-278; 


INDEX 


515 


Richardson,  278-281;  written  for  the 
middle  classes,  280;  Fielding,  281- 
285;  as  a  picture  of  life,  292;  as  a 
literary  form,  283 ;  its  humanity,  285, 
288;  enlarged  area  of,  286;  biographic 
scheme  of,  286;  Sterne,  286-289;  re- 
action toward  wholesomeness,  289; 
realism,  200;  women's  novels,  291; 
romantic  movement,  292;  "gothic," 
293-294;  with  a  purpose,  295-296, 
367,  392;  its  categories,  391;  local  col- 
or, 393;  the  romantic  impulse  hi 
Scott,  396;  use  of  criminal  life  with 
Bulwer,  401;  children,  406;  with  a 
purpose,  412;  Stevenson,  425-428 
Novum  Organum,  162 

"Obermann,"  369 

"Obermann  Once  More,"  370 

Oberon,  129 

OCCLEVE,  THOMAS,  64 

Ochiltree,  Edie,  397 

"Ode  to  Cromwell"  (Marvell's),  176 

"Ode   on   the    Duke   of   Wellington," 
356 

"Ode  to  Duty"  (Wordsworth),  302 

"Ode  to  Evening,"  240 

"Ode   on   the  Intimations   of   Immor- 
tality," 302,  307-308 

"Ode  on  Nativity,"  182 

"Ode  on  the  Passions,"  240 

"Ode  to  the  West  Wind,"  318,  319 

Odes  (Collins's),  240,  243 

Odes  (Dryden's),  206 

Odes  (Gray's),  242 

Odes  (Keats's),  323,  326 

O'Donovan, ,  462 

Odyssey,  Chapman's,  98;   Pope's,  229 

Of  Great  Place,  Bacon's  essay,  163 

"Of  Heroic  Plays,"  207 

O'Grady,  Standish,  463 

Old  Age  (in  Morality  Plays),  108 

"Old  China,"  331 

Old  Curiosity  Shop,  404 

Old  English,  i 

Old  Fortunatus,  151 
395 
t,  The,  i« 

Old  Wives'  Tale,  The,  123,  453 

Oliver  Twist,  404 

Olivia,  in  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  200 

On  Baile's  Strand,  464 

"On  a  Dead  Child,"  438 

"On  the  Death  of  Mr.  William  Her- 
vey"  (Cowley),  175 

"On  a  Distant  Prospect  of  Eton  Col- 
lege" (Gray),  242 

"On    First    Looking    into    Chapman's 
Homer,"  323 

"On  a  Grecian  Urn"  (Keats),  323,  324, 
325 


Old  Mortality,  395 

Old  Testament,  The,  15 


"On  Idleness"  (Dr.  Johnson),  249 

"On  Melancholy,"  323 

"On  the  Morning  of  Christ's  Nativity" 
(Milton),  182,  189 

"On  the  Receipt  of  My  Mother's  Pic- 
ture" (Cowper),  265 

"On  Spring"  (Gray),  242 

"On  the  Popular  Superstitions  of  the 
Scottish  Highlands"  (Collins),  241, 
243 

"On  the  Tenure  of  Kings  and  Magis- 
trates" (Milton),  187 

"On  Translating  Homer"  (Arnold),  372 

One  of  Our  Conquerors,  420 

"One  Word  More,"  366 

Open  Country,  448 

Ophelia,  135 

Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel,  The,  420 

Origin  of  Species,  The,  356 

Orlando  Furioso,  96 

Orosius,  20 

Orphan,  The,  211,212 

Ossian,  244-245,  310 

Othello,  131,  136-137,  138,  146 

OTrigger,  Sir  Lucius,  256 

Ottava  rima,  96-97 

OTWAY,  THOMAS,  211-212 

Outcry,  The,  445 

Overreach,  Sir  Giles,  156 

Ovid,  204,  232 

Ovid's  Banquet  of  Sense,  98 

Oxford,  34,  50,  58,  72,  73,  84,  86,  169, 
180,  224,  227,  299,  317,  334,  335,  347, 
368,  372,  373,  378,  381,  433 

Oxford,  Earl  of,  102 

Oxford  movement,  The,  348,  349,  447 

Padua,  44,  178 

Pagan  Poems,  434 

Pageants,  in  miracle  plays,  105-106 

Pair  of  Blue  Eyes,  A,  422 

Palace  of  Art,  354,  443 

Palamon,  52,  65 

Palamon  and  Arcite,  204 

Pamela,  278,  279,  280,  281,  282,  455 

Pandarus,  45 

Pantisocracy,  209 

Paola  and  Francesca,  322,  437 

Papists,  203 

Paracelsus,  360 

Paradise  Lost,  170,  176,  187-189,  100, 

191 

Paradise  Regained,  170,  191 
Pardoner,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  50, 

53 

Paris,  35 

Paris  (city),  23,  86,  168,  285,  287 
Parlement  of  Foules,  44,  45,  54 
Parliament,  25,  47,  157,  158,  169,  227, 

229,  257,  259,  343 
Parson,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  50,  52 


INDEX 


Partial  Portraits,  445 

"Partridge  Predictions,  The,"  218-219 

"Passer  By,  A,"  438 

Passionate  Friends,  The,  457 

Past  and  Present,  350 

Pastoral  Care,  or  Shepherd's  Book,  20 

Pastorals,  87,  102,  185 

Pastorals  (Pope's),  229 

Pater,  Walter,  429,  433 

P.atient  Griselda,  the  Clerk's  Tale,  53 

Patrician,  The,  455 

Patronage,  392 

Patronage,  70,  118 

Paul  Clifford,  401 

Pauline,  360,  362 

Peace,  in  miracle  plays,  108 

Pearl,  The,  36  et  seq. 

Pecksniff,  404 

Peebles,  Peter,  397 

PEELE,  GEORGE,  89,  117,  122-123 

Peg  Woffington,  412 

Pelham,  the  Adventures  of  a  Gentleman, 

400,  401 
Pembroke,  Countess  of,  87 

Penitential  Psalms  (Wyatt's),  77 

Pepys,  Samuel,  209-210 

Percy,  Bishop,  244 

"Percy  and  Douglas,"  89 

Perdita,  140 

Peregrine  Pickle,  285,  286 

Perfect  Wagnerile,  The.  459 

Pericles,  114 

Pericles  and  Aspasia,  337,  339 

Periodicals,  222-223 

Persius.  204 

Personifications,  240 

Persuasion,  394 

Peterborough,  21 

Peter  the  Great,  275 

Petrarch,  44,  54,  77 

Petre,  Lord,  in  Rape  of  the  Lock,  233 

Phantom  Rickshaw,  The,  448 

Philanderer,  The.  459 

PhUasler,  149 

Philip  of  Spain,  96 

Philip  the  King.  444 

Philistinism,  371 

Phillips.  Stephen,  437 

Philostrato.  45 

Phoenix.  The,  16-17 

Phanix's  Nest,  The,  100 

Phyllis,  loo 

Picaresque  stories,  405 

"Pictor  Ignotus,"  365 

Pickwick  Papers,  403,  404 

Picture  of  Dorian  Gray,  The,  433 

Piers  Plowman,  50,  60-62,  63,  64 

Pilgrim's  Progress,   195-196,   197,   209, 
274  et  seq 

Pindar,  175 

Pindaric  Ode  (Gray's),  243 


"Pindarique  Odes,"  175 

Pinero,  Arthur  Wing,  459 

Pipes,  in  Roderick  Random,  285 

Pippa  Passes,  362-363 

Pirate,  The,  398 

Plague,  The,  57,  59,  275 

Plaindealer,  The,  189 

Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills,  448 

Plantagenet,  260 

Plato,  93,  96,  322,  344 

Plautus,  in,  128,  145 

Playboy    cf   the   Western   World,    The, 

467 

Plays,  103  et  seq. 

Plays  Pleasant  and  Unpleasant,  459 
Plegmund  (Archbishop),  20 
Plowman,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  50 
Poems  and  Ballads  (Swinburne),  386 
Poems  before  Congress,  367 
Poems  of  Monarchy,  100 
Poems,   chiefly  in  the  Scottish  Dialect 

(Burns),  269 
Poetaster,  The,  144 
Poetical  Rhapsody,  100 
Poetical  Sketches  (Blake),  267 
Poet-laureate,  144,  203,  356 
Poetry,  i,  2,  3.  8,  13,  15,  17,  21,  66,  68, 
76,  77.  78,  81.  82.  88,  92,  99,  100,  165, 
166,  168,  201,  202,  229,  298,  327,  358, 
435,  436 

Political  Economy.  Ruskin's,  375~376 
Political  Justice,  317 
Polonius,  135 
Polyolbion.  100 

POPE,  200.  204,  205,  220-235;  life,  229; 
limitations,  230-231;  poetic  qualities, 
231,  Homer,  232;  Rape  of  the  Lock, 
233;  character.  234,  satire,  234; 
Essay  on  Man,  232,  his  contempo- 
raries, 236 

Pope  of  Glasgow,  The  (Campbell),  312 

Pope,  The.  71,  72,  94 

"  Poppy,  The,"  439 

Porphyrio,  m  St.  Agnes'  Eve,  325 

Portia,  133,  134 

Portrait  of  a  Lady,  The,  445 

Portugal.  71,  122,  281 

Poyser,  Mrs.,  417 

Prteterita,  377 

Prelude,  The.  302 

Preraphaelites,  The,  378,  379,  381,  385* 
3.86 

Pride  and  Prejudice.  394,  395 

Prince  Hal,  131 

Prince  Regent,  The,  322 

Princess,  The,  355,  359 

Printing,  69,  71 

Prioress,  The,  in  Canterbury  Tales,  50, 
52 

"Progress  of  Poetry,  The,"  243 

Prometheus  Unbound,  318,  319,  320 


, 

287, 


418, 


Prose,  English,  59,  76,  85,  92,  164, 
193,  194,  207-208,  226,  229,  250, 
335,  377 

Prospero,  141 

Protestant  Cemetery  at  Rome,  318 

•'Prothalamion,"  93 

Proudie,  Mrs.,  412 

Provence,  29 

Pseudoclassic,  243,  250 

Psychology,    in    modern    novel, 
420 

Public  Ledger,  253 

Publishers,  Elizabethan,  78,  86 

Puck,  129,  169 

Pullets,  The,  417 

Puritans  and  puritanism,  86,  88,  91 
154,  155,  156,  157,  159,  160,  1  68, 
181,  184,  194,  198,  199,  202,  208, 
210,  212,  213,  225,  280,  371 

Purvey,  John,  59 

Put  Yourself  in  his  Place,  412 

Pyramus,  129 


,.,-v^,.  ^lills,  299 

train,  Lander's  last,  338 
^»  Mab,  317 
'Queen's  Garden,"  376 
Queen's  Quhair,  The,  448 
Quentin  Dunvard,  395 
Quibbles,  Elizabethan,  115 
Quilp,  in  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  404 
Quintessence  of  Ibsenism,  The,  459 
Quixote,  289 

Racine,  200 

RADCLIFFE,  ANNE,  294-295,  393,  413 

RALEIGH,  SIR  WALTER,  81,  92,  95,  101, 

207 

Ralph  Roister  Bolster,  in,  144 
Ralpho,  209 
Rambler,  The,  247,  250 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  The,  229,  233 
Raphael,  in  Paradise  Lost,  188 
Rationalism,  261 
READE,  CHARLES,  412 
Realism,  145,  199,  264,  290,  378,  411, 

412,  415,  420,  421,  425,  430,  431,  432, 

435,  448,  449,  453,  463 
Red  Branch     epic  cycle,  462 
Red  Cross  Knight,  The,  95 
Redgauntlet,  397 
Reformation,  The,  50,  59,  71,  72,  75, 

76,  80,  98,  167,  184,  412 
Reform  Bill  of  1832,  341,  343 
Regan,  138 
Rehearsal,  The,  211 
Religio  Laici,  203,  206 
Religio  Medici,  178 
Reliques  of  Ancient  English  Poetry,  67, 

244 


422 


INDEX  517 


Renaissance,  The,  44,  43,  55,  70,  72, 
73,  74,  83,  91,  161,  162,  183,  198, 
199,  200,  215;  defined,  70;  elements, 
71;  in  England,  72,  80,  98;  poetry, 
92;  learning,  93;  problems,  95;  sensu- 
ousness,  97 ;  popularity  of  the  drama, 
103;  intellectual  curiosity,  no;  in- 
fluence of  France,  199 

Renaissance,  The  Second,  322 

Renaldo,  in  Count  Fathom,  285 

Research  Magnificent,  The,  457,  458 

Rest  Harrow,  448 

Restoration,  The,  192,  193,  195,  198, 
201,  202,  207,  213,  215,  288;  drama, 
257 

Restoration  comedy,  212,  213 

Return  of  the  Druses,  361 

Return  of  the  Native,  The   no, 

"Revenge,  The,"  356 

Review,  The,  275 

Revolution  of  1688,  The,  203 

Rheims,  41 

Rhodope,  338 

Rhone,  377 

Rhyme,  38,  63,  77,  82,  88,  97,  102,  201, 
210,  211 

Rhyme  of  Sir  Thopas,  The,  53 

Rhyme,  Royal,  55,  65 

Rhythm,  38  et  seq.,  54 

Rich,  Lady.     See  DEVEREUX 

Rich,  Lord,  87 

Richard  I,  399,  448 

Richard  II,  45 

Richard  II,  130 

Richard  III,  127,  130 

Richard  Yea  and  Nay,  447,  448 

RICHARDSON,  SAMUEL,  278-281,  283, 
290,  291,  292;  Pamela,  278;  his 
method,  279;  his  character  and  pur- 
pose, 280 

Richardson  (the  painter),  192 

Richelieu,  200 

Richmond,  Duke  of,  78 

Riddles  (Cynewulf),  16 

Riders  to  the  Sea,  467 

Rienzi,  401 

Ring  and  the  Book,  The,  361 

Rivals,  The,  255,  266 

River  of  Death,  The,  196 

Roaring  Girl,  The,  152 

Robert  Elsmere,  447 

Robertson,  Thomas,  458 

Robespierre,  353 

Robin  Hood,  273 

Robin  Hood  Plays,  no 

Robinson  Crusoe,  219,  276,  277 

Rob  Roy,  397 

Rochester,  in  Jane  Eyre,  413 

Rockingham,  Marquis  of,  259 

Roderick  Hudson,  445 

Roderick  Random,  285,  286 


INDEX 


ROLLE,  RICHARD,  34 

Roman  de  la  Rose,  42,  47,  60 

Roman  Empire,  The  Decline  and  Fall 
of  the,  258 

Romances,  28,  29,  87,  272,  273,  274, 
384;  and  see  novel,  391 

Romantic  revolt,  The,  351 

Romanticism,  145,  148,  175,  176,  201, 
237,  238,  240,  242,  243,  244,  246,  254, 
262,  263,  267,  292,  294,  295,  297,  298; 
in  the  novel,  292-295;  in  eighteenth 
century,  237  el  seg.  ;  its  return  to 
nature,  298;  Coleridge,  209-301; 
Wordsworth,  301-309;  Southey,  309- 
310;  Scott,  310-312;  Campbell,  312; 
Byron,  313-316;  Shelley,  317-321; 
Moore,  321;  Keats,  322-327;  Criti- 
cism, 327;  Lamb,  320-332;  Hazlitt, 
33i-333;  De  Quincey,  334~336 

Rome,  7,  14,  20,  29,  50,  71,  75,  94 

Romeo  and  Juliet,  114,  128,  129,  132 

Romola,  417 

Roots  of  the  Mountains,  The,  384 

Rosalind,  in  As  You  Like  It,  133,  134 

Rosdyndf,  oo 

"Rose  Aylmer,"  337 

Rosencrantz  and  Guildenstern,  136 

ROSSETTI,  CHRISTINA,  381 

ROSSETTI,  DANTE  GABRIEL,  367,  378- 
381;  parentage,  378;  his  imagery, 
379;  later  life  and  poetry,  370-380; 
his  "painter's"  poetry,  380 

Round  Table,  The,  7,  29,  31,  68,  357 

Roxana,  277 

Royal  Society,  The,  209 

Rugby,  368 

RUSKIN,  JOHN,  early  life  and  art  criti- 
cism, 374-375;  ethical  and  economic 
teaching,  375;  his  style,  377;  in- 
fluence on  Preraphaelites,  377-378; 
medievalism,  377 

Russell,  George  W.,  463,  465 

Rydal  Mount,  302 

SACKVILLE,  THOMAS,  79,  113,  118 
Sacrifice  of  Isaac,  The,  105,  106 
"Sad  Fortunes  of  the  Rev.  Amos  Bar- 
ton, The,"  416 

"Sailing  of  the  Sword,  The,"  382 
St.  Albans.    See  BACON 
St.  Cecilia's  Day  (ode),  206 
St.  Mark's,  377 
St.  Mary  Redcliffe,  245 
St.  Mary's,  Oxford,  346,  347 
St.  Patrick's,  Dublin,  217 
St.  Paul's,  1 66 
St.  Peter,  185 

St.  Philip  Neri,  Oratory  of,  348 
Salome,  433 
Salvator  Rosa,  295 
Salve,  434,  435 


Samoa,  426 

Samson  Agonistes,  191-192,  387 

Sandford  end  Merlon,  206 

Sartor  Resartus,  349,  350,  351 

Satan,  191 

Satires,  230,  233,  235 

Satires,  Dryden's,  203 

"Saul,"  365 

Saxons,  The,  i,  5,  6,  7,  19,  47 

Scenes  of  Clerical  Life,  416 

Schaffhausen,  377 

Schiller,  Life  of,  by  Carlyle,  349 

"Scholar  Gypsy,  The,"  370 

School,  458 

School  for  Scandal,  The,  255,  256 

School  of  Abuse,  The,  88 

Schoolmaster,  The,  83 

Scop,  3,  4,  5,  12,  1 6,  25 

"Scotch  Drink,  The"  (Burns),  268 

Scotch  highlands,  244 

Scotchmen,  331 

Scotland,  155,  241,  267,  268,  285,  304. 
349,  300,  397,  398 

SCOTT,  SIR  WALTER,  28,  262,  298,  303, 
310,  312,  321,  328,  339,  395-399,  401. 
406,  409,  412,  417;  as  a  poet,  310- 
312;  his  career  as  novelist,  395~399: 
his  romanticism,  396;  his  use  of  scene, 
396;  his  characters,  397;  his  love  of 
the  past,  398;  his  use  of  incident, 
398-399;  his  use  of  history,  399 

Scriblerus  Club,  230 

Seasons,  The,  238-239 

Sedley,  Amelia,  407,  408;  in  Vanity 
Fair,  Joseph,  407 

Seeva,  335 

Sejanas,  144 

"Self-Dependence,"  369 

Selkirk,  Alexander,  276 

Seneca,  112,  113,  114,  145 

Sense  and  Sensibility,  393,  394 

"Sensitive  Plant,  The,"  318 

Sentimental  Journey,  287 

Seraphim,  The,  366 

Serious  Reflections  of  Robinson  Crusoe, 
277 

Sesame  and  Lilies,  376 

Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture,  374 

Seven  Seas,  The,  450 

Seventeenth-century  literature,  91  et  seq^ 
143 

Severn,  Joseph,  324 

Shadow  of  the  Glen,  The,  467 

Shadowy  Waters,  The,  464 

Shaftesbury,  203 

SHAKESPEARE,  WILLIAM,  36,  45,  49,  81, 
87,  90,  92,  100,  103,  109,  114,  115, 
116,  118,  120,  121,  124-142,  144,  145, 
146,  147,  148,  149,  150,  151,  152,  153, 

159,   100,   l8l,   183,  200,   212,   234,  248, 

249,  255,  289,  324,  329,  330,  339,  353, 


INDEX 


519 


357.  363,  365,  367;  life,  124-126; 
period  of  experiment,  127-128;  earliest 
masterpieces,  128;  historical  plays, 
130-131;  strengthening  of  his  art, 
131;  joyous  comedies,  133;  change  of 
spirit,  134;  sonnets,  133-134;  the 
dark  comedies,  134-135;  Hamlet,  135- 
136;  Othello,  136-137;  Lear,  137-138; 
last  plays,  140-141;  contemporary 
appreciation,  141-142;  carelessness 
of  fame,  142 

"Shameful  Death,"  382 

Sharp,  Becky,  407,  408,  409 

Shaving  of  Shagpat,  The,  420 

Shaw,  George  Bernard,  452,  450-461 

"  She  dwelt  among  the  untrodden  ways," 
302 

SHELLEY,  PERCY  BYSSHE,  30,  246,  314, 
324,328,337,339,351,360,396;  com- 
pared with  Crashaw,  168;  life  and 
poetic  development,  317-318;  Pro- 
metheus Unbound,  318-319;  his  lyrical 
genius,  319-320;  his  myth-making 
power,  320;  unreality  of  his  work, 
321 

SHELTON,  JOHN,  76. 

Shepherd's  Calendar,  92,  93,  94     • 

Shepherds'  Week,  236 

SHERIDAN,  RICHARD  BRINSLEY,  255-257 

She  Stoops  to  Conquer,  253,  254-255 

Shirley,  414 

SHIRLEY,  JAMES,  156,  157,  210,  212 

Snoemakers'  Holiday,  The,  in,  151 

Shortest  Way  with  Dissenters,  The,  275 

Short  View  of  the  Profanity  and  Im- 
morality of  the  English  Stage,  213 

Shylock,  120,  133 

Siddall,  Miss,  379 

SIDNEY,  SIR  PHILIP,  96,  100,  101,  102, 
144,  183,  205,  207 

Siege  of  Rhodes,  210 

Sigerson,  Dr.,  462 

Silent  Woman,  The,  145 

Sttex  Sdnttilans,  169 

SUves  Box,  The,  455 

Sir  Charles  Grandison,  280,  281 

Sir  George  Tressady,  447 

SIR  THOMAS  MORE,  73,  74 

"Sister  Helen,"  380 

"Sister  Songs,"  439 

Sister  Theresa,  434-435 

"Skylark,"  3 1 8,  320 

"Slaughter  of  the  Innocents,  The," 
104 

SMOLLETT,  TOBIAS,  285-286,  405,  443 

Society,  458 

Socrates,  339 

"Sofa,  The,"  265 

"Sohrab  and  Rustum,"  369,  370 

Soldiers  Three,  448 

"  Soliloquy  in  a  Spanish  Cloister,"  364 


"  Solitary  Reaper,"  302 

Solmes,  in  Clarissa  Harlowe,  279 

Solmes  Forsythe,  in  The  Man  of  Prop- 
erty, 455 

Somersley  Rectory,  318 

"Song  at  the  Feast  of  Brougham  Cas- 
tle," 274 

Song  of  the  Sword,  The,  441 

Songs  from  Books,  450-451 

Songs  of  Innocence  and  Experience 
(Blake),  267,3" 

Sonnet,  The,  introduced  into  English 
by  Wyatt,  77;  Shakespearian,  78; 
Sidney's,  86-87;  Spenser's,  93; 


Shakespeare's,  133-134 

Portug 
Sordello,  300 


Sonnets  from  the  Portuguese,  366,  367 


Sorrel,  Hetty,  417 

SOUTHEY,  ROBERT,  299,  309-310,  312, 

South  Sea  House,  330 

South  Seas,  426 

Southwark,  155 

Spain,  155,  166 

Spanish  rogue  stories.    See  PICARESQUE 

Specimens  of  English  Dramatic  Poetry 

(Lamb),  330 

Spectator,  The,  223,  225,  228 
Speculum  Meditantis,  56 
SPENCER,  HERBERT,  416 
SPENSER,  EDMUND,  81,  87,  89,  92,  170, 

171,  176,  182,  183,  185,  200,  205,  239, 

322,  324,  325;  life  and  works,  92-93; 

Cambridge  period,  93;  in  London  and 

Ireland,  94-95 ;  his  style,  95 ;  his  art, 

97;  morality,  98;  puritanism,  98 
Spenserian  school,  The,  186 
Spenserian  stanza,  The,  239 
"Spring,"  238 

Squeers,  in  Nicholas  Nickleby,  405 
Stage  Player's  Complaint,  The,  157 
Statius,  64,  232 
STEELE,  RICHARD,  214,  223,  224,  226, 

227,  228,  331,  410 
Stella  (Swift's),  216,  217 
"Stepping  Westward,"  304 
STERNE,  LAURENCE,  286-289,  290,  291, 

401 
STEVENSON,   ROBERT  Louis,  425-428, 

429,  441,  443 
Stiggins,   the  Rev.   Mr.,  in  Pickwick, 

4°3 

Stones  of  Venice,  374,  377 
"Story  of  Muhammed  Din,  The,  '  449 
Story  of  Thebes,  The,  56 
Story  of  the  Glittering  Plain,  The,  348 
"Strange    Ride    of    Morrowby    Jukes, 

The,"  449 

Strawberry  Hill,  260 
Strife,  4SJ 


INDEX 


520 

Style,  88,  90,  94,  126,  258,  259,  35,8; 
Sir  Thomas  Browne's,  179;  Addi- 
son's,  226;  Steele's,  227-228;  Swift  s, 
222;  Pope's,  232;  Dr.  Johnson's,  250; 
Burke's,  263;  Lamb's,  331;  De 
Quincey's,  335!  Carlyle's,  353;  Rus- 
kin's,  377;  Newman's,  348-349 

"Sublime  and  the  Beautiful,  Inquiry 
into  Origin  of  our  Ideas  on  the,"  259 

SUCKLING,  SIR  JOHN,  174 

"Summer,"  238 

"Summum  Bonum,"  361 

Surface,' Charles,  256 

Surface,  Joseph,  256 

Surface,  Sir  Oliver,  256 

SURREY,  EARL  OF,  76,  78,  79,  92,  96 

Suspiria.  de  Profundis,  334,  335 

SWIFT,  JONATHAN,  204,  226,  230,  234, 
235,  247,  254,  284,  408,  410;  life,  27, 
215,  216;  political  career.  217-218; 
practical  nature,  216;  activity,  218; 
method,  219;  Gullh-er,  217,  218,  219; 
attitude,  220-221;  style,  222 

"Swiftly  walk  over  the  western  wave," 
319 

SWINBURNE,  ALGERNON  CHARLES,  337; 
his  poetry  of  revolt,  385;  his  verse 
mastery,  387;  his  dramas,  387 

Switzerland,  314,  315,  374 

"Switzerland,"  369 

Sykes,  in  Oliver  Twist,  404 

Symbolism,  431,  432 

Synge,  J.  M.,  466,  467 

Tagore,  Rabindranath,  465 

Tale  of  a  Tub,  216,  218,  219 

Tale  of  Two  Cities,  A,  404 

Tales  from  Shakespeare  (Lamb),  330 

Tales  of  the  Hall,  264 

Talisman,  The,  395,  399 

Tamburlaine,  118,  119,  120,  122,  127 

Taming  of  the  Shrew,  The,  132 

"Tarn  o'Shanter,"  270 

Tapley,  Mark,  404 

Task,  The,  265 

Tasso,  1 86 

Taller,  The,  223,  225,  227,  228 

TAYLOR,  JEREMY,  181,  222,  377 

Teazle,  Sir  Peter,  256 

Tempest,  The,  140,  145 

Temple,  Sir  William,  216 

Temple,  The,  167,  169,  347 

TENNYSON,  ALFRED,  100,  303,  320,  327, 
339,  34°,  362,  365,  366,  368,  369,  370, 
376,  382,  386,  428,  436,  437,  438,  442, 
443,  458,  462;  his  birth,  354;  his 
interest  in  public  questions,  355 ;  his 
science,  356;  finish  and  compass  of 
his  style,  358;  his  weak  dramatic 
sense,  357;  his  sense  of  law,  358-359; 
contrasted  with  Browning,  359 


Tess    of   the    D'UrberviOes,    422,    423, 

"Testament    of    an    Empire    Builder, 

The,"  443 

"Testament  of  a  Vivisector,  The,"  443 
Teufelsdrock,  Herr  Diogenes,  351 
Thackeray,    William   Makepeace,  401, 
406-411,  412,  413,  414;  his  influence 
on   Bulwer,    401;     structure   of    his 
novels,  407;   his  attitude  toward  the 
world,  408;    his  use  of  history,  409- 
410;  his  greatness,  410 
These  Twain,  454 
Thomas-a-Becket,  49 
THOMPSON,  FRANCIS,  438-440;  religious 
poetry,   438-439;    love-poetry,   430- 
440;    kinship  with   the  seventeenth 
century,  440 

THOMSON,  JAMES,  238-240,  263,  327 
Three  Plays  for  Puritans,  460 

Three  Sorrows  of  Story-Telling,  467 
"Thyrsis,"  320,  370 

Timber,  147 

Time  Machine,  The,  456 

Timon  of  Athens,  140 

"Tintern  Abbey,"  302,  306,  307,  310 

Titus  Andronicits,  127,  153 

"To  Althea  from  Prison,"  174 

"To  a  Nightingale,"  323,  325 

"To  a  Poet  Breaking  Silence,"  438 

"To  a  Street  Piano,"  443 

"To  Lucasta  on  Going  to  the  Wars,"  174 

Toby,  Uncle,  287,  289 

Tom  Jones,  282,  283 

"To  Monica  Though  Dying,"  440 

Tony  Bungay,  457 

"To  the  Dead  Cardinal  of  Westmin- 
ster," 439 

Tollel' s  Miscellany,  79 

Touchstone,  133 

Toxophilus,  83 

Tragedy  of  Blood,  153,  154 

Tragic  Muse,  The,  445 

Tragedy  of  Nan,  The,  444 

Traveller,  The,  253,  254 

Travels  of  Sir  John  MandeviUe,  The,  68 

Treasure  Island,  426 

Trick  to  Catch  the  Old  One,  A,  152 

Trim,    Corporal,    in    Tristram   Shandy^ 
289 

Tristram  Shandy,  286,  287,  288,  289 

Troilus  and  Creseide,  54,  55,  56 

Troilus  and  Cressida,  134 

TROLLOPE,  ANTHONY,  411—412 

Trouveres,  382,  383 

Trunnion,  Admiral,  286 

Tulliver,  Maggie,  418 

Tulliver,  Mrs.,  418 

Turner,  William,  374 

Turn  of  the  Screw,  The,  446 

Twelfth  Night,  133,  134,  US 


INDEX 


521 


Twickenham,  230 
Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,  128 
Two  in  a  Balcony,  361 
TYNDALE,  WILLIAM,  76 
Typhoon,  451 

UDALL,  NICHOLAS,  in 

"Ultonian"  epic  cycle,  462 

Ulysses,  437 

Unities,  The,  112 

Universities,  The,  112,  113,  114 

Unto  this  Last,  375 

Unwin,  Mrs.  Mary,  265 

Urn  Burial,  178,  179 

"Use  of  Riches,"  234 

Usk,  169 

Utopia,  74 

Vale,  434 

VANBRUGH,  SIR  JOHN,  213 

Vanity  Fair,  407-408,  409,  411 

"Vanity  of  Human  Wishes,  The,"  247 

Vathek,  History  of  the  Caliph,  294 

VAUGHAN,  HENRY,  169 

Venice  Preserved,  212 

Venus  and  Adonis,  98,  126,  130 

Vicar  of  Wakefield,  The,  253,  289-290 

Vice,  The,  in  miracle  plays,  109 

Victoria,  340,  341 

Victorian  Era,  336,  340,  341,  342; 
comparable  with  Elizabethan,  342; 
general  characteristics,  342;  its  stren- 
uousness,  342;  its  moral  impulse,  354; 
tendency  toward  reflection,  359;  its 
sociological  drift,  375;  reaction 
against  insistent  morality,  385;. 
Swinburne,  386 

Victory,  451 

Village,  The,  264 

Villelle,  414 

"Vindication  of  Isaac  Bickerstaff,  A," 
219 

Viola,  133 

Virgil,  204 

Virgin  Martyr,  The,  156 

Vishnu,  335 

Vivian  Grey,  400 

Vohr,  Vich  Ian,  397 

Volpone,  144,  146 

Volsung,  384 

Voltaire,  262 

Vox  Clamantis,  57-58 

Voyage  to  Lisbon,  Journal  of  a,  281 

Vulgar  Errors,  178 

Wales,  6,  20,  31,  32,  169,  317,  334 
WALLER,  EDMUND,  202 
WALPOLE,  HORACE,  293 
WALSH,  WILLIAM,  231 
WALTON,  ISAAC,  180 
"  Wanderer,  The,"  18,  39 


"Wandering  of  Usheen,  The,"  463 

WARD,  MRS.  HUMPHRY,  446-447 

Warden,  The,  411 

WARNER,  WILLIAM,  100 

War  of  the  Worlds,  The,  456 

WATSON,  WILLIAM,  437-438 

Waverley,  395,  397 

Way  of  all  Flesh,  The,  452,  453 

Way  of  the  World,  The,  213 

"We  are  Seven,"  302 

WEBSTER,  JOHN,  153-154,  324 

"Wedding  of  the  Clans,  The,"  462 

Well  of  the  Saints,  The,  467 

WELLS,  HERBERT  GEORGE,  452,  456-458 

V.'elsh,  Jane,  350 

Wesley,  John,  297 

Westbrook,  Harriet,  317,  318 

Western,  Sophia,  282,  283 

Westminster  Review,  416 

Westminster  School,  202,  264 

Westward  Ho,  415 

West  Wind,  Ode  to  (Shelley),  319 

Whig  Examiner,  The,  222 

White  Devil,  The,  153 

"White  Man's  Burden,  The,"  450 

"Who  is  Silvia?"  128 

Widower's  Houses,  459 

Widow  in  the  By-Street,  The,  443 

"Widsith,"4 

Wife,  The,  437 

"Wife's  Lament,  The,"  17 

Wilde,  Jonathan,  275 

Wilde,  Oscar,  433,  434 

Wildfire,  Madge,  398 

Wild  Gallant,  The,  202 

William  the  Conqueror,  24 

William  III,  203,  216,  274 

Winchester,  21 

Wind  Amongst  the  Reeds,  The,  464 

"Windsor  Forest,"  229 

Wings  of  a  Dove,  The,  445 

"Winter,"  238 

Winter's  Tale,  A,  140 

WITHER,  GEORGE,  170-171 

"Without  Benefit  of  Clergy,"  449 

"With  the  Night  Mail,"  449 

Woman  in  the  Moon,  The,  1 15 

Women  Beware  Women,  153 

Woodlanders,  The,  424 

Wordsworth,  Dorothy,  299,  301 

WORDSWORTH,  WILLIAM,  239,  263,  267, 
321,  324,  334,  337,  339,  342,  351,  356, 
358,  388,  396;  as  "exponent  of  the 
new  poetry,"  299;  his  life,  301;  his 
nature  poetry,  303-304;  his  treat- 
ment of  human  nature,  304-305;  his 
mysticism,  305-306;  his  "meta- 
physical imagination,"  307;  difficul- 
ties in  approaching  him,  308-309 

"Wordsworth's  Grave,"  437 

"World,  The,"  Vaughan's  poem,  169 


522  INDEX 

Worldly  Wiseman,  Mr.,  195  467;  his  poetry,  463;  the  significance 

Withering  Heights,  413  of  his  achievement,  464 

WYATT,  SIR  THOMAS,  76-77,  78,  92,  06  "Ye  Mariners  of  England,"  312 

WYCHERLEY,  WILLIAM,  213,  234  You  Never  Can  Tell,  459 

WYCLIF,  JOHN,  49,  52,  58-59,  69,  71,  75  YOUNG,  EDWARD,  240,  241 

Wyclifs  Bible,  59,  193  Youth,  451 

Wye,  The,  306 

"Yarrow  Unvisited,"  302  Zanoni,  401 

Yeast,  415  Zola,  Emile,  411,  424,  434 

Yeats,  William  Butler,  463-465,  466,  Zutphen,  86 


